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TrackerFF 4 days ago [-]
One important part of the story is in the very beginning: The founder’s motivation. To become wealthy.
You see this in the startup world a lot. Founders with 5+ failed startups in different sectors, because said founder picked the fields mainly by doing some market analysis. Not domain expertise.
There’s then a big mismatch between what the founder thinks is possible, and what the domain expert thinks is possible.
The defense is of course that some people can do that - Musk did it, so why not?
Another defense is that blindingly naïve optimism is sometimes needed to move the needle, as the concept “that can’t be done” simply doesn’t exist to some people.
I’ve sat through some pitches like that, where it is very obvious that the founder/CEO has limited knowledge and expertise in what they’re pitching, where the product is limited, but their enthusiasm is off the charts.
EDIT: The very latest happened only a couple of weeks ago. A startup had reached out to my employer as they’re developing a platform in our domain. Higher ups liked what they’d seen, enough to arrange a real meeting.
Startup is only 3 months old, and the moment I opened the platform I recognized a vibecoded (likely using clause) platform identical to almost all other launched on a daily basis.
So I probed a bit about data sources, serious questions regarding security, etc. but the guy was pretty fluent in consultant (turns out he had worked as a management consultant before launching), and the CTO was just nodding along.
In the end they wanted our data, and promised the moon on features - but as mentioned, I’m sure the whole product was entirely vibecoded.
pseudohadamard 4 days ago [-]
> The founder’s motivation. To become wealthy.
Or, if they're an engineer, to design cool products while not having the faintest idea of how to run a business and manage people. Ran into far more of those than get-rich-quick types.
Having said that, I was also lucky enough to work for a company where the founder had a science degree but not in the field he was currently working in, was really good at sales, and recognised that others knew a lot more about the field than he did and was willing to listen to them. One of the lead tech guys could literally say to him "this is a stupid idea" and the idea would get changed. They muddled along for some years until he found the right people to run things, and have been doing pretty well ever since. Last I checked it was still a good place to work for.
thih9 4 days ago [-]
> they wanted our data, and promised the moon on features
I know a company that fits this so well that I almost want to check the names. It's older than 3 months though.
kekqqq 4 days ago [-]
I also know a company that fits this very well. I wonder how many such companies are out there.
thih9 4 days ago [-]
In a one electron universe[1] it might actually be the same company (with a very productive sales team).
> Founders with 5+ failed startups in different sectors, because said founder picked the fields mainly by doing some market analysis. Not domain expertise.
You mean the moment when someone says "It's Facebook but for dogs! That should be easy, right? I had the idea, that's the hard bit, you just need to write it!"
search_facility 4 days ago [-]
... Today its "Claude just needs to write it" and the "hard part" is the prompt :)
smallnix 4 days ago [-]
> I’ve sat through some pitches like that, where it is very obvious that the founder/CEO has limited knowledge and expertise in what they’re pitching, where the product is limited, but their enthusiasm is off the charts.
And for all the talk of investing into people, what was your opinion?
latexr 4 days ago [-]
Would you invest in a person with limited knowledge and expertise just because they’re enthusiastic? Might as well hire a literal clown; all the enthusiasm you might want and way cheaper.
HumanOstrich 3 days ago [-]
Now this is the kind of honest snark I would hire.
lionkor 4 days ago [-]
Not OP, but overconfidence is not a quality I would invest in.
sph 4 days ago [-]
You must not be from California
overgard 4 days ago [-]
Musk strikes me as a guy that keeps succeeding despite his bad ideas because the system is so rigged that getting wealthy off one good bet can sustain you forever. I mean, his track record this entire decade is proposterously stupid (cybertruck, twitter, everything he says on twitter, the CSAM and deepfake creation engine known as grok, DOGE, etc.). When his companies succeed, its mostly because the people he's hired treat him like a toddler they need to appease while keeping him out of the important things. To me he's not a positive example, he's an embarassment that demonstrates that being rich does not require insight or intelligence.
mlacks 4 days ago [-]
Why is it that people focus on the negatives. I'm not going to pick apart the whole comment but World's first self-landing rocket ship and best selling electric car in the world are not figments of a "system is rigged that getting wealthy off one good bet can sustain you forever".
lobsterthief 4 days ago [-]
You’ve cherry-picked two successful examples but ignored all his failures. He wasn’t even solely responsible for those two successes. He didn’t found Tesla. He didn’t even found PayPal. He’s not an aerospace engineer. The number one predictor of future wealth and success is starting with wealth to begin with.
Muhammad523 4 days ago [-]
> World's first self-landing rocket
The Buran, a soviet spaceplane very similar to the space shuttle, landed autonomously
fragmede 2 days ago [-]
Suspiciously similar. Also, it didn't land like a rocket.
overgard 4 days ago [-]
I focus on the negatives because they're so massive. Elon didn't even start Tesla, he was an investor that forced the founder out. I'll concede that SpaceX is a little better, but even then a lot of his ideas are profoundly stupid (while I think colonizing the solar system is worthwhile, doing it on Mars is very dumb. You'd need to build underground bunkers so people don't die of cancer from radiation, and there aren't that many useful natural resources there. The moon is much more useful from a practical standpoint of creating easier access to the rest of the solar system, and Titan makes a lot more sense for a sustainable colony. But Elon is a toddler so he just went "Mars!!")
Lets throw in a few more of Elon's failures, this time lets focus on the ones that are outright dangerous or killing people!
- In an accident, the Cybertruck has frequently trapped people inside the vehicle and caused them to burn to death when the batteries catch fire because they hid the manual release on the doors for aesthetic reasons, so people couldn't get out. Also the unbreakable glass means that people spent their final moments desperately trying to smash an unbreakable window while burning to death. People have died from this! It was totally predictable and preventable! https://www.ktvu.com/news/parents-woman-killed-cybertruck-cr...
- Fully self driving. Hasn't happened, and a lot of the danger is because he wanted to cheap out on lidar and brashly overpromised on its capabilities.
Lets also focus on some of the funny ones that came from his need for validation, like needing people to think he's a great gamer: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2025/jan/20/elon-musk-stan... (why would any adult not involved in E-Sports even want to convince their peers they're great at gaming? Like, who cares?!)
Even when he has a good idea like Starlink he ruins it by awful about it (shutting it off for entities he disagrees with).
This guy should not be anyone's hero.
fragmede 2 days ago [-]
The man's had failures and he's had successes. What did he do to you that you'd spend this much time and effort focusing on his failures instead of going out and building your own thing?
mlacks 3 days ago [-]
Hey thanks for the throrough response. I see your point, but I think anyone with their whole life on display would have plenty of failures to go with the successes. For FSD, I believe its done - see the following:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwMlAj1tpQg
overgard 2 days ago [-]
It is true that most of us wouldn't look great under a microscope, but the way I see it Elon very obviously wants attention, and he very obviously wants to change the world in dramatic ways that he should be accountable for (whether positive or negative), so scrutiny is entirely fair.
cpursley 4 days ago [-]
[flagged]
oxzidized 3 days ago [-]
I didn't see any mention of politics in the comment you're replying to.
One can dislike various aspects of a person without it being politically motivated.
taneq 4 days ago [-]
I think he genuinely broke his brain during the Model 3 ramp up. They were in production hell for something like a year, and he hasn’t been quite right ever since. Maybe that was just the point at which he got rich enough to stop caring what other people think, though.
m463 4 days ago [-]
I think Musk actually wasn't in it for the money.
He made all the money first the silicon valley way (paypal) and then decided to actually make and sell non-software/ip things that physically exist. I think that is actually hard. And if successful very valuable.
Although making software isn't easy, I think there are lots of silicon valley types who create IP, but enter a super-competitive market. IP can be valuable, but it might be quick and easy to spool up a competitor and/or copy it.
teiferer 4 days ago [-]
> The defense is of course that some people can do that - Musk did it, so why not?
If you think that Musk did his endeavors in order to become rich, you are likely mistaken.
trinari 4 days ago [-]
What drives him then? Power?
hobofan 4 days ago [-]
Seeking approval. It's apparent from everything he posts on X + the memeing + the whole "I am a elite Path of Exile"-saga.
Shacklz 4 days ago [-]
> + the whole "I am a elite Path of Exile"-saga
That was the most "the emperor wears no clothes"-moment I've ever witnessed in my life. I play more PoE than I care to admit, and it was obvious within mere seconds that he has absolutely no clue what's going on.
It was absolutely surreal to watch.
rustystump 4 days ago [-]
It started with d4 before poe and was painfully obvious then. Poe was just icing on the cake as it is not for the casual.
It is also so bizarre to brag about rankings for games where the grind to end game is a massive time sink. It wasnt like he was some LoL god where there is no grind only skill.
alexashka 4 days ago [-]
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brailsafe 4 days ago [-]
Keep the totally out of pocket red-pill misogyny outta here. Where did that even come from
alexashka 4 days ago [-]
[flagged]
thih9 4 days ago [-]
Interesting, I didn't know; context:
> His character, at the impressive level of 95, reflected not only a significant time investment but also a high degree of expertise.
> Musk’s performance has sparked skepticism about whether he genuinely leveled and equipped his character himself.
> The prevailing sentiment in the gaming community is that Musk doesn’t typically invest much time in video games, but instead leverages gaming achievements to draw media attention.
I think "self promotion" is a better description than "seeking approval".
IMO people who are seeking approval tend to not go out of their way to be assholes quite so often ("pedo guy" incident, for example).
sph 4 days ago [-]
> Seeking approval
Yea, that’s called narcissism. Their only drive in life is to be admired, and it’s much easier to lie and deceive to reach that goal, than doing something that’s truly praiseworthy
youngtaff 3 days ago [-]
More posts about British politics than SpaceX recently!
TacticalCoder 4 days ago [-]
Some people are just driven. A friend of mine who failed at a first startup (in a domain in which he had lots of expertise) then succeeded with his second startup: very nice exit but that's not why he was doing it.
He's an action junkie.
In both cases he saw inefficiencies and just wanted to spend the energy he's always been overflowing with to improve things. I don't know about Musk but my friend hates mediocrity and saw everything as something he can improve.
In another case I was in car, for a long trip, with someone else (who was working to become an... Ambassador: hardly the tech type!) and that person would constantly comment on what could be done enhanced.
Something something about personality types, the builders, etc.
Those who only ever want to spend the money of --and benefit from the wealth created by-- others are going to dismiss it all as "people who are after money" but it's more complicated than that and you can't generalize people.
I know several doctors for example: two of them are clearly money-driven (one of them literally told me "I'd never ever teach medicine, I'm in this only for the money") but most of the others I know are just happy to help people be more healthy.
I've got another friend, not rich at all, he's working an additional job as a firefighter: sure it brings some money, but that's not the reason. He's also an action junkie. He was there driving ambulances during Covid: to be helpful, for the action, etc.
It's not all about money. Thinking it's only about money is a mindset that often comes from those who want the money of others (through taxes).
AlexeyBelov 3 days ago [-]
> Thinking it's only about money is a mindset that often comes from those who want the money of others (through taxes).
Thanks for your agenda, was really looking forward to it.
actionfromafar 2 days ago [-]
You made me lol
californical 4 days ago [-]
I don’t hear this perspective too often in my bubbles and it does make a lot of sense - the money of these people would be a means to an end. Sure they might want more money to enable their goals, but the money itself isn’t the goal.
Thanks for sharing, it’s nice to be reminded of potential other motivations of people who outwardly seem to just want to accumulate money.
teiferer 4 days ago [-]
Though this action drive (and the means he has) could be used for so much better. Humankind's top 10 problems don't include the issue of being confined to a single planet. That far down the list. The actual stuff gets you less attention from the tech crowd. Hunger. Poverty. Wars. Droughts. Mass extinctions. Climate change. Transmittable diseases. Cancer. Alzheimers. It's beyond me how one can reasonably argue (or defend somebody who does) that we really ought to focus on becoming multi-planetary.
actionfromafar 2 days ago [-]
It's the same in the "through taxes" camp. You have the action junkies there too, they were just airdropped into some political context for some circumstantial reason.
sscaryterry 4 days ago [-]
Spreading his seed.
teiferer 4 days ago [-]
A charitable response would be the desire to push the boundaries of what is (or is considered) possible.
A less charitable response would be the desire for attention and approval to fill some kind of deeply rooted inferiority complext.
The latter view would also illustrate a similarity to Trump.
philipallstar 4 days ago [-]
Going to Mars.
stickfigure 4 days ago [-]
I'm convinced this is a schtick. Not that he doesn't genuinely want that, but it's not the root motivation. I suspect it's something more like wanting to be perceived as a real-world Tony Stark. The cave rescue capsule episode is illustrative. The guy likes attention.
fragmede 4 days ago [-]
Armchair analysis would also mention that Jeff Bezos is going for the Moon with his space, and how do you beat that guy with that ambition? Get to Mars, first. From a scientific perspective, the Moon makes more sense, but if we frame it as billionaires trying to out do one another, what comes after who's got the bigger yacht? So a competition between billionaires on who's better also makes sense as his true motivation.
End of the day though, why does it matter his true motivation? If I was working at one of his companies, as long as the paycheck cashes and the stock options are legally mine, if his motivation is money-based or attention-based or he's a true believer, I'm getting money and I can feed my kids.
It's not like I'm
going to get the chance to talk with him personally and get to know him and sus out what it is, either, so it's all just pointless theorizing. What we, the general public "know" is a result of various people with their own agenda pushing their owna viewpoints? Does the man know anything at all, is he a total charlatan, or is he smart and gets it? Hit refresh on a different subreddit and get a different answer.
latexr 4 days ago [-]
> End of the day though, why does it matter his true motivation?
Are you asking why the motivations of one of the richest (and thus most influential) people on the planet matter? He’s actively influencing domestic and foreign elections to further his own goals. He gutted government aid programs, leading to millions of deaths. He shares propaganda to a massive audience. Of course his motivations matter.
> If I was working at one of his companies, as long as the paycheck cashes and the stock options are legally mine, if his motivation is money-based or attention-based or he's a true believer, I'm getting money and I can feed my kids.
Yeah, until the world he creates is one where you can’t. The reason the world is in its current fucked-up state is that too many people think like that. Until the leopard eats their face and they’re surprised, but by then it’s too late.
paytonjjones 4 days ago [-]
> wanting to be perceived as a real-world Tony Stark
The thing is, he _had_ this. He had all of Reddit worshipping him. He had the press. He had the tech-internet.
Then he knowingly blew it all up overnight to ally with Trump.
I think the reasons why are pretty clear: a son-who-loves-me became a daughter-who-despises-me and his companies got repeatedly hamstrung by California Democrats.
But if his root motivation was truly just approval, he would have taken it on the chin and accepted slower growth of his other ambitions. So it's a little more complicated than that.
otterley 4 days ago [-]
> Then he knowingly blew it all up overnight to ally with Trump.
He blew it up years before that with his "pedo guy" false accusation drama.
4 days ago [-]
stickfigure 1 days ago [-]
> Then he knowingly blew it all up overnight to ally with Trump.
This is speculation, but I am guessing that he didn't do this knowingly. He's probably surrounded with yes-men who didn't challenge his fever dream of swooping in, fixing the government, and being lauded as a hero.
philipallstar 2 days ago [-]
> Then he knowingly blew it all up overnight to ally with Trump.
It's true. Nothing the American left hates more than an ex-Democrat. If only they hadn't made being a centrist a Republican position.
ashishb 4 days ago [-]
Listen to any on the Elon Musk interviews, he knows more technical intricacies of his 1000+ employee companies than your average startup founder with 10 employees.
FireBeyond 4 days ago [-]
Or can sound like it. Like when he talked on an investor call about one of the myriad reasons for vision only: “we are good with rain and fog because our cameras do photon counting and can account for it”.
Except… they don’t.
You need a different type of camera - one not optimized for “vision” (in the sense of “object discernment”) - one Teslas do not have.
And even if they did, to count photons you need an enclosed space in front of your lens, not the … open road.
Which is annoying: Teslas haven’t had that, and could never have that but he goes on an investor call and openly lies about it, and doesn’t get called out. It’s not even an “aspirational statement” it’s a lie that goes against the laws of physics.
He knows a lot, and he also knows enough to be able to be confidently wrong and pass the bullshit meter of people who don’t know any better. They are not the same thing.
Georgelemental 4 days ago [-]
> The defense is of course that some people can do that - Musk did it, so why not?
Nope. Musk has been obsessed with rockets and electric cars, specifically, for a very long time
sixtram 4 days ago [-]
Oh, I'm glad I don't work in the oven business. We're just starting a stealth startup that's revolutionizing dishwashers, and the prototypes are amazing. They use less water, less detergent, and this weekend we're hoping to solve the last remaining issue: occasionally, they break glasses.
quijoteuniv 4 days ago [-]
Oh, I’m glad I don’t work in the oven or dishwasher business. We’re just starting a stealth startup that’s revolutionizing coding assistants, and the prototypes are amazing. They write code faster, explain it better, and this weekend we’re hoping to solve the last remaining issue: occasionally, they deploy to production.
vntok 4 days ago [-]
This issue does not come from the coding assistant. In fact, humans will occasionally do the exact same thing as long as their tools have enough permissions to deploy to both local and prod from the same environment.
Fix it by separating the tools (different non-interconnected VMs, etc for dev/qa/preprod/prod environments) and the permissions (different accounts, sessions, tokens, etc for the run/debug/test/deploy loops).
flowerbreeze 4 days ago [-]
It sounds like you're joking, but I've long dreamed of a different type of dishwasher. One that washes instantly. I don't need it to fit more than a single plate at one time. Just put something in from one end, and out comes clean and dry plate on the other end. Like a car wash.
I am quite certain these exist already large kitchens and I seem to remember one from a school diner from maybe 35 years ago, but I've always been wondering why they don't exist on smaller scale.
Waterluvian 4 days ago [-]
Restaurant dishwashers use an enormous amount of water. They require a hot water supply that’s much hotter than residential heaters typically supply. They require a more complete manual pre-rinse and scrub. They only accept kitchenware that’s made for them and destroy the rest.
Restaurants cycle dishes a lot during a single mealtime. Homes don’t. I don’t think “I can’t wait 2 hours” is typically a real problem.
Skwid 4 days ago [-]
Those I've used in the UK aren't so bad, they're cold fill only with a heating element in the sump. It takes maybe 15 minutes to fill and get up to temperature at the start of a shift, after that each cycle is ~2 minutes.
The hot water is recirculated during the wash, the rinse uses fresh water from the tap with the excess going out an overflow.
A little sump water gets replaced every cycle, but enough stays that it's back up to temperature before you've emptied and refilled it.
There's also a small peristaltic pump to top up the detergent directly from the bottle.
Not much benefit in a home setting unless you fancy having it hot and ready 24/7 though.
swiftcoder 4 days ago [-]
They also have the clever system of standardised, removable baskets. Need to increase dishwashing throughput? yank the clean basket, line them up on the counter to dry, and run a new basket through
This is probably the one trick consumer dishwashers should emulate
hilariously 4 days ago [-]
The problem in basically any consumer kitchen is storage - having racks and racks of stuff under your big stainless steel commercial countertops is no problem.
emj 4 days ago [-]
So sell small scale scullery, sink, storage and sorting systems to save and subvert storage solutions.
youngtaff 3 days ago [-]
Buy two dishwashers — one of clean stuff and one for dirty stuff — my brother’s seriously thinking about doing it when his kitchen is remodelled
iterateoften 4 days ago [-]
Those Restaurant “dishwashers” are sanatizers. A dishwasher is a person in a restaurant. They are the ones removing and getting the dish clean.
Waterluvian 4 days ago [-]
Dishwashers? How dare you. We preferred to be called “Sanitation Engineers - Dishwashing Division” Even had bossman put it on our paystub (he was so tolerant of us kids. I think he was just happy that we were into buffoonery and not meth).
bckr 4 days ago [-]
Engineer? Wow, that’s high falutin. Sanitation Technician is as high as I got.
aryehof 4 days ago [-]
Sure it wasn't Sanitation Team Lead?
vntok 4 days ago [-]
Dishwasher? I hardly know her!
fwipsy 4 days ago [-]
Did this actually happen? That's pretty wholesome lmao.
Waterluvian 4 days ago [-]
It was definitely one of the more tame activities at work. We would golf rotten potatoes into the field behind the restaurant. Play Celery Generals with traffic, make Concoctions and get the waitresses to test and rate them, and we had an entire WWF wrestling league (that was exclusively judged by the entrance strut and banter; there was never any actual wrestling). Sometimes we’d make new pizza recipes and present them to the kitchen staff of the pizza shop next door. Their contribution to the bit was to act incredibly Italian in their wholesale rejection of our pie. Sometimes we’d even do work.
AstroJetson 4 days ago [-]
How did they turn down your Black Olive and Pineapple Pizza? Asking for a friend.
doubleorseven 4 days ago [-]
the real problem with home dishwasher is that it extend the duration of the task.
the task is prepare food, eat, clean.
when you leave the kitchen and come back the next day the task is now different, its unpack, prepare,eat,clean.
you are constantly not finishing today's tasks. it lives to see another day. if you can fix it, bound it to the workflow, you will be a billionaire
Nebasuke 3 days ago [-]
I think it's just a perception thing. I don't see emptying the dishwasher as part of the task that is filling it. My last task of the day is normally turning the dishwasher on and to me my task list feels finished. In some sense the tasks related to dishwasher for a day are "empty -> fill -> turn on".
You could use your same type of reasoning for food/cooking. When you buy food and put it in the fridge to cook later, you haven't finished the task. I think that's more a way of feeling permanently uncomfortable with things not being finished. There is no end state for most things in the house. Work is never done.
jayd16 4 days ago [-]
Easy. Just keep your dishes in the dishwasher instead of the shelf.
doubleorseven 4 days ago [-]
oh yes, the two dishwashers solution
paufernandez 4 days ago [-]
A friend of mine actually did it, and he is quite happy.
tedmiston 3 days ago [-]
> you are constantly not finishing today's tasks. it lives to see another day. if you can fix it, bound it to the workflow, you will be a billionaire
dual dishwashers
Leonard_of_Q 4 days ago [-]
> I've always been wondering why they don't exist on smaller scale.
Because they need space, they need even more nasty chemicals than domestic dishwashers, they need a stack of trays to load the dishes on and a crew to load and unload them.
If you want a dishwasher which doesn't require unloading after use you can get 2 of them, one of which is "clean", the other "dirty" or washing. When the "dirty" one is full you turn it on and let it wash while you take whatever you need from the "clean" one. Once the formerly-dirty one has finished it's cycle the roles are reversed and it becomes the "clean" one.
I've used these while working as a volunteer in a camp kitchen during work weekends, where we had maybe 20-40 guests eating a meal. You put dishes/silverware/pots/pans/whatever in a square tray, push it into one side of the Hobart, and pull down a lever to close the doors and start the cycle. They take a number of minutes that you can count on one hand... I seem to remember 90-120 seconds but I'm not sure. Stuff comes out clean and hot on the other side, and you want to pipeline this so it's one person with dirty hands feeding stuff in, and one person with clean hands (and thick gloves) pulling the square trays out, letting them cool, and putting the clean dishes/etc. away.
They release a huge amount of steam and they're wonderful for this kind of volume (20-40 people at a meal + all the cooking implements to support this). Larger than home use, though --- unless of course you had a mansion with servants. And I get the sense that maintenance and operating costs would be a lot higher than a regular plain dishwasher.
raddan 4 days ago [-]
When I was a teenager, my very first real job (after being a paperboy) was being a dishwasher in a popular local seafood restaurant. Minimum wage at the time was $4.25/hr but they offered me $5.50/hr. Boy howdy!
On one shift I was paired with a ex-convict. With the exception of the cooks themselves, most of the kitchen was staffed with high school students and ex-cons. The ex-con I was paired with was a dead ringer for Roger Daltry. I was on the "dirty" side and he was on the "hot" side (because there is a pecking order in even the worst jobs), and for some reason, he wanted _me_ to control the opening of the door. I think the reason is that this guy was high all the time and would space out unless something grabbed his attention. Anyway, I made the mistake of opening the door a bit too soon, when the machine was running, and it blasted this guy with steam. I remember him yelping in pain and then glaring at me angrily. One of the line cooks said something along the lines of "we try not to kill our dishwashers" which probably stopped the guy from punching me.
It's a beast of a machine. A little out of place in an ordinary household kitchen...
mhb 4 days ago [-]
I've dreamed of a dishwasher for people who prioritize clean dishes quickly and quietly over the incremental savings from using asymptotically less water or energy. See also low flush toilets and clothes washing machines.
theoreticalmal 4 days ago [-]
Too bad the government demands you prioritize the latter
askvictor 4 days ago [-]
I've long dreamed of a dishwasher that can detect when you remove the (cleaned) dishes from it, and presents a display saying 'load dishes' or something like that. And after finishing a cycle, says 'unload dishes'. Should be pretty easy to achieve with some load cells in the feet, but haven't seen any like that.
Sheeny96 4 days ago [-]
We had this at my old work, except it wasn't a display, it was a circular piece of paper with "clean" on one side and "dirty" on the other. When it was done, you rotate the paper so it was clean side up. Should we have gone for series A? It was a pretty great MVP after all, albeit manual, but automation of the paper flipping would of course come on the second iteration
Skwid 4 days ago [-]
There's also the upgrade path of 2 dishwashers with a single 'clean' token moved between the two. Cupboards are an legacy product holding back progress.
fragmede 4 days ago [-]
So the product to make then, is a dishwasher that's the size of cabinets, so people can afford to have two of them in the existing space that they have.
> We had this at my old work, except it wasn't a display, it was a circular piece of paper with "clean" on one side and "dirty" on the other. When it was done, you rotate the paper so it was clean side up.
The downside of low tech solutions if many people touch it (i.e. not just the janitor or rostered staff) is that someone can still add their shared mug to the dishwasher just after a cycle's complete, causing the entire batch to be considered unclean. Or in your example, someone deciding to flip the sign but not emptying out the dishwasher.
Then again, these are little things that people have learnt to make do and just live with, and I'm not sure it's worth paying 2x or 3x, or even 20x the price just for fancy feet, like what the article thinks people might do with a fancy oven.
klondike_klive 4 days ago [-]
I would for sure be that rookie who is paralysed with indecision over whether to read "clean" as an adjective or an imperative. Is it telling me that it's clean or that it needs cleaning?
Feathercrown 4 days ago [-]
Given "dirty" would make a strange (although valid) imperative, it would likely be referring to the state of the dishes
4 days ago [-]
DANmode 4 days ago [-]
Bezos has magnet versions.
briHass 4 days ago [-]
Many modern ones have a door open sensor that allows for the dishwasher to display that dishes are clean after a cycle until the door is opened and fully closed again.
That doesn't help, however, if users are lazy and don't unload the dishwasher after opening it to grab a clean plate or whatever.
It's a nice feature that can be added with existing sensors and one line of logic in the uC. Another one I noticed recently is garage door openers with the photo transmitter/receiver ('beam') to stop the door if someone blocks it can use that same beam to turn on the light if broken when the door is up. Handy if entering a dark garage from outside.
wgd 4 days ago [-]
Some dishwashers add a simple timer-based heuristic so if you open it for just a few seconds while you lazily grab something the "clean" indicator stays lit.
TowerTall 4 days ago [-]
I used to have two dishwashers. One for clean. One for dirty.
aequitas 4 days ago [-]
What you really want is 2 dishwashers! That way you never have to unload the dishwasher because you alternate your dishes between the two. The one that has just completed the cleaning cycle has now become a cupboard with the clean dishes and the other one becomes the dirty dish storage and vice versa.
AstroJetson 4 days ago [-]
I have a friend whos kitchen is almost the size of my apartment. They have a "dish" dishwasher and a "glass" dishwasher with different inside configurations. Woe to me that only has a sink and loaded into the wrong dishwasher.
(They also have a fridge and then two pull out drawer units, one is for keeping extra snacks frozen things (like ice, ice cream, juice etc.) and the other is for veggie / meat.)
mejutoco 3 days ago [-]
I feel like between plates, cups, pots, strainers etc for this to work I would need 4 or 5 dishwashers. Basically replacing each cupboard with cleanable utensils with a dishwasher.
With 2 dishwashers one would use some clean plates and maybe leave some pots behind that would not be used for a while. In practice, these would need to be emptied. It is a great idea if one uses only one dishwasher worth of utensils though.
I think of those toilet modules in japan where you can clean the whole bathroom with a hose. Maybe what we need are self cleaning cupboards.
afandian 4 days ago [-]
I don't know the first thing about dishwashers, but it seems obvious to me.
The cycle-to-volume ratio is as bad as it could possibly be. Conventional dishwashers recirculate water as they wash and rinse. I imagine there's an mx + c formula to how much water is needed (c = enough water to prime the pump or whatever). So compared to a normal size load, you'd be wasting that constant amount of water.
The wash is also likely going to follow mx+c (c = time for grease to break down, time to rinse, time to dry etc). You can wait a few hours for a whole set of crockery. Can you wait a few hours for a single plate?
Commercial "passthrough" dishwashers work very differently. Manual mechanical action with a spray, plus a quick wash, sterilise and rinse. At that point why not wash your single plate by hand?
HelloNurse 4 days ago [-]
It can be accurately simulated with appropriate brushes and rags, water and soap, and a sufficient number of hands.
chairmansteve 4 days ago [-]
I quite frequently just rinse my plate or cup under the tap and put it on the drying rack. Instant!
chasd00 4 days ago [-]
The answer is obviously paper plates and plastic silverware /s
BobBagwill 4 days ago [-]
Then someone has to remember to buy them and take out the trash. The canonical solution is for you and your lazy roommates to eat straight from the pot over the sink. When done, fill the pot with water, to discourage the ants and roaches. Occasionally, you end up with a drowned ratling, but hey, wachagonna do?
One pot, no dishes. Each roommate has to keep track of their private spoon. Greedy "clever" roommate who shows up with a liter ladle triggers a spoon fight in the kitchen. Eating from pot by hand is corrected by rapping their knuckles with your spoons. Eventually, all the glassware ends up broken, and some bozo threw out all the used red solo cups, but luckily, the kitchen faucet has a spray attachment.
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman's Odyssey
fragmede 4 days ago [-]
If you're going to optimize that, move over to Soylent or Huel. Instead of preparing food and eating it, it's more efficient to mix powder with water, and for people to drink the resulting slurry. As long as that mix has all the things a body needs, you're all set. No mess!
ValentineC 4 days ago [-]
[dead]
jayd16 4 days ago [-]
In bars that cycle a lot of glassware they actually do seem to use high heat and break a lot of glasses. But it's fine, the restaurant just buys cheap (easily broken) glasses so it all works out.
I hope you are planning for a rotating base as a core feature.
moffkalast 4 days ago [-]
I hope it's not the approach of using less water by not rinsing properly in the end, so people have to either eat soap or rinse everything manually afterwards, wasting far more water. I swear Bosch is so terrible at this.
afandian 4 days ago [-]
The innovation here is clearly edible soap.
And the 'less water' claim is technically correct, but it doesn't mention the decamethylcyclopentasiloxane. Just because it's complicated to spell, you understand.
broken-kebab 4 days ago [-]
>edible soap
Sodium bicarbonate residue won't kill our customers, so consider it technically edible. The issue of taste and efficiency will be approached after MVP
afandian 4 days ago [-]
Luckily our investors helped us out with the regulatory capture, so we don’t need to worry about the safety, just the palatability.
I bought some edible cups out of curiosity a few years back. Nice for coffee. I did end up eating them all, although some of them were still dry at the time of consumption.
I think edible soap has better behaviour-adjusted shelf-life here.
sfn42 4 days ago [-]
I recently learned that you should add detergent for the pre-wash rinse as well. May dishwashers have a separate pocket next to the detergent pocket, often there isn't even a lid on it or the lid has openings so the detergent falls out as soon as you close the door. If they don't have the symbolic pocket you can just pour some extra detergent anywhere, like just spill some outside the main pocket or pour it into the bottom.
This allows the pre-wash cycle to get rid of most of the grease and stuff before the main cycle so the main cycle is more effective and the water is cleaner so the final rinse works better too.
tdeck 4 days ago [-]
Perhaps a match for the UK market? From what I've read they often don't rinse the soap off of dishes there (I wish I were making this up).
afandian 4 days ago [-]
Maybe it's the cause of our "bad teeth".
(I heard the rumour too. But no-one I know fails to rinse the "washing up liquid" (as we call it) off their plates)
camtarn 4 days ago [-]
Sadly it's true. I've seen people just put the dishes in the dish rack and let the soap bubbles slide off them.
lmm 4 days ago [-]
If there was enough soap residue to matter you'd notice the taste.
ericpauley 4 days ago [-]
Do you use rinse aid?
sumitkumar 4 days ago [-]
And the broken glass breaks the dishwasher. It is a feature: planned obsolescence.
Tyr42 4 days ago [-]
That's handwashing right?
DANmode 4 days ago [-]
Are you really doing this?
I’d like to speak with you, if so.
eudamoniac 4 days ago [-]
It's a joke. The point being that dishwashers have to use more water and energy because breaking glass is the bottleneck of how hot and pressurized the water can be. The joke is that startup founders ignore tradeoffs and are trying to make an impossible product while marketing it as soon solved. Like "we found a way to increase voltage with no increase in watts! We are just trying to work around the decrease in amperage..."
DANmode 4 days ago [-]
What if you ozonated the water?
I’ve seen laundry setups where the water is ozonated, and no detergent (or hot water!) is required to remove debris and oxidize oils and other gunk out of clothes.
kordlessagain 4 days ago [-]
I'm 6'7".
I absolutely hate bending over to unload the dishwasher. When I open a dishwasher, it should slide out and lift itself to cabinet height. And it should just hold an entire bottle of detergent so I don't have to put it in each time.
albumen 4 days ago [-]
We installed our dishwasher at hip height, with the cupboard for clean dishes directly above. Bending down is a thing of the past.
The two dishwashers idea is neat, but the cupboard capacity is greater than that of a second dishwasher; and we haven’t got the space!
bgins 3 days ago [-]
Incredible comment lmao
euroderf 4 days ago [-]
> less water, less detergent,
I achieve the first two goals by simply scrubbing+rinsing dishes after most uses and letting them dry. No glued-on food to go gnarly. They go thru the dishwasher once in a while. It's my personal strategy for being eco without getting food poisoning, but I've never seen a paper that evaluates this method in comparison to more-typical workflows (i.e. in-sink wash-using-soap or in-dishwasher wash-using-soap).
brap 4 days ago [-]
We keep seeing this. If you had to point out the fundamental problem, what would it be?
I think it’s the disconnect. Each persona is an expert in their own field but is completely oblivious to other critical areas.
The founder knows how to raise money but doesn’t really understand the customers. The engineer knows the tech but doesn’t really understand what it takes to keep the business afloat. The salesperson knows what customers want but doesn’t really understand what’s possible to make. The investor knows the numbers but doesn’t really understand how poorly the business is run.
I suspect if you look at successful startups you’ll often see a very small (1-3) group of founders who are very close, each can do more than one thing really well, and their combined expertise means that together they have very few blindspots.
"The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.
Why do so many founders build things no one wants? Because they begin by trying to think of startup ideas. That m.o. is doubly dangerous: it doesn't merely yield few good ideas; it yields bad ideas that sound plausible enough to fool you into working on them."
Finding a problem _you have yourself_ also increases the chance that you understand the problem space.
whstl 4 days ago [-]
I dunno, going back to the article, at some point customers are getting exactly what they're asking for:
"their kitchens are custom-built, so they need ovens with specific dimensions. Oh, and a rotating base like the one they already have."
“My oven at home connects to the fireplace. Does yours?”
“I make a lot of wedding cakes, what have you got for me?”
“Do you have a Ramadan mode?”
Those are all problems.
But are they problems worth spending time? I dunno.
dijksterhuis 4 days ago [-]
> But are they problems worth spending time?
They're not problems people need solved. They're problems people think they want solved. need != want.
the high street bakers needed reliability with improved efficiency at an affordable price (cost of risk). they didn't need improved efficiency, less reliability and still really expensive.
singron 4 days ago [-]
Pre-purchase, the customers are just looking at lists of features. Post-purchase, they realize the ovens burn bread and cake 10% of the time and pizza 100% of the time, and they just want a good working oven that doesn't burn food.
It seems like most customers are returning the oven, which would normally be an extremely strong signal that there is a quality problem. In the SaaS world, the equivalent would be churn, but it's not always as straightforward since if users quit before they sign up (e.g. by reading a review or using a free trial), then they don't show up in that metric.
throwaway7783 4 days ago [-]
In SaaS quality is one of the problems that cause churn. Value,price and politics also play a big role - now matter how good or bad the product quality is
andyfilms1 4 days ago [-]
The key difference is the founder built a product in search of a problem to solve, rather than the other way around.
The "secret" is just to talk to people in the field they're trying to "revolutionize," and ideally observe them work. Often, people become blind to workflow problems and workarounds become normal process. They never even consider to look for a better way to do something. Those are the opportunities for founders to solve.
But what I've seen a lot is founders just arbitrarily coming up with an idea that sounds cool on paper, raising money, and only realizing too late that there is zero actual market fit.
evolve-maz 4 days ago [-]
That's because the assumption is the new product can already do what their current product can, so the things customers ask for is the extras.
It's really easy to forget that a lot of work went into "baseline" features which are assumed to be standard (in this case the not burning part).
gmueckl 4 days ago [-]
A lot pf good products are a combination of features that customers need and use and features they think they need and ask for, but never use. But the sales wouldn't be as good without them. It's a bit comical once it becomes apparent, but it is a widespread pattern.
ryanbrunner 1 days ago [-]
I've worked for startups that worked on genuine problems that had high customer demand, and there was still the problem of selling what the product could be instead of what it is. At least in my experience, it's omnipresent in B2B and has to be specifically handled regardless of how well your solution addresses a problem.
cm11 4 days ago [-]
People trying to think of startup ideas aren't doing it accidentally. They don't want ovens or baked goods. They want to be a founder and/or money. I feel like PG is only right halfway (which maybe means he's not right). He's implying it's wrong to do it that way (to try to think of startup ideas), that it won't work, but geez louise has it worked. To get funded, to get rich, to get an exit. He's also helped enable that path quite a bit.
__MatrixMan__ 4 days ago [-]
...which is why none of the best software is a product or a service. The best software is always a tool, made by people who have a problem for people who have that problem.
Occasionally the business types come along and make it worse by turning it into a product or a service. Other times they make bad products and bad services from scratch.
The people in this story are focusing at the wrong layer (as are many of us). They need to stop trying to sell ovens and start trying to sell baked goods. Maybe once they're good at that, they can also sell whatever oven they came up with along the way.
4 days ago [-]
korrectional 4 days ago [-]
Wow I never heard about his blog but just spent the last 3 hours reading it and wow its a treasure trove
paulryanrogers 4 days ago [-]
> Finding a problem _you have yourself_ also increases the chance that you understand the problem space.
If most founders are wealthy, or even reasonably comfortable, it's possible they're too out of touch to identify a problem shared by enough people.
teiferer 4 days ago [-]
Depends what kind of market you are going after. Mass market for end users, sure, your argument applies. But there are lots of other types too.
willturman 4 days ago [-]
> Enterprise sales isn’t about ovens.
The handshake comes first. The requirements come later.
__MatrixMan__ 4 days ago [-]
Which is why income inequality is so insidious. The more successful your rich people are the less effective they become.
christina97 4 days ago [-]
This may apply to B2C firms, but B2B firms are more likely to be run by people similar to them.
terminalbraid 4 days ago [-]
> The engineer knows the tech but doesn’t really understand what it takes to keep the business afloat.
This is assuming there IS a way to keep the business afloat. It's this framing of thinking that has caused more suffering, frustration, and bad will in all the places I've worked at which are just reskins of this article.
A business is entitled to it's model but it is not entitled to success. This story which is more than just a strawman or anecdote gets it right: The engineers are doing their job the best they can with unreasonable expectations set by people who do not feel they need to be constrained by reality and just have dollar signs in their eyes. The engineers do not share the same type of blame as everyone else at the company. Their failure was enabling nonsense and greed.
icedchai 4 days ago [-]
Yep. I've worked at a couple startups where engineering built a thing, sales was able to sell it but had to give a huge discount. The resulting economics just didn't work. But, each sale was seen on its own as a success even though the generally lost money. Often there was a discount plus some promised bespoke feature that required additional development to close the sale. There was never enough volume and often that additional engineering work never applied to another customer. Nobody wants to say "maybe this deal just isn't worth making" and move on.
In a couple of these cases, the company was ultimately sold in a fire sale. The early investors, founders, and employees got nothing. The acquisition is still celebrated as a "success", of course.
codingdave 4 days ago [-]
> The salesperson knows what customers want
No, and neither does anyone else in these scenarios. Almost all startups are trying to build something new that they want people to want. But customers almost universally do not want your product. They don't give a crap about you or your product. What they care about is delivering their own product and/or achieving their own goals. Your product is a tool. If it is a tool that helps them for a reasonable price, they will buy it. But never be fooled into thinking "They want my product". They don't. They want an effective tool to to meeting their own needs. Your product wins when it is that tool.
dzonga 4 days ago [-]
well said - few people realize how selfishly people(customers) are driven.
the trick to sales is to feed into that selfishness.
msteffen 4 days ago [-]
I read somewhere that almost every very successful person’s results can be attributed to 2-3 tricks that they consistently apply to great effect.
With Elon, I think one of his is “build it as cheaply as possible, and then you can afford to only sell to people who are purely excited about the tech.” I don’t know when he learned this (I actually wonder if it was a lesson he learned from Eberhard/Tarpenning at Tesla, who were only selling the roadster to sports car enthusiasts who cared more about 0-60 than fit & finish, or range, or cost, or anything else).
Anyway, my current interpretation is that the pizza guys shouldn’t have sold to pepepizza (or friends and family, probably). I know startups do this all the time, but whenever I’ve seen it, it always seems to turn into a distraction from the Big Idea that is the company’s thesis. Then Big Customer gets hung up on ancillary requirements and Cool Startup doesn’t really get to test their thesis at all. Maybe the key is to stay small, focus on finding people who really care about the new oven tech, and size the company to that market until you’ve solved enough problems to expand to people for whom the cool tech is concern #2 or #3.
felix-the-cat 4 days ago [-]
> I read somewhere that almost every very successful person’s results can be attributed to 2-3 tricks that they consistently apply to great effect.
This entirely. I've been CTO at a handful of startups, most recently one that sold for a very large sum of money — and the successful ones are almost always led by people who keep things dirt simple: focus on the customer, execute quickly, communicate clearly, keep costs low, and keep the technology simple. That's basically it. Just a few simple things, applied relentlessly.
The ones that failed were always the total opposite — not listening to their customers, poor communication across the org, blowing their runway on "we need Google-scale infrastructure," switching languages or frameworks halfway through the project, and so on.
ryandrake 4 days ago [-]
Every startup/SmallCo I worked for seemed to fall into this trap. Sales finally finds a BigCustomer, and the company instantly transforms from a product company into a custom engineering contractor for BigCustomer. We're no longer building our own product vision: We're cramming everything BigCustomer is asking for while they hold a carrot tied to a stick in front of us. We no longer have a general product that can be sold to anyone. We have BigCustomer's wish list and they still haven't bought more than a handful of units.
ValentineC 4 days ago [-]
On the other hand, if they'd focus on building their core product (an oven) while taking BigCompany's money, and without listening to the multitude of smaller requests from potential customers who might not even hand over a single cent, they might have eventually gotten somewhere.
I agree that being a "custom engineering contractor for BigCustomer" might not have been the ideal outcome, but at least the entire company would have gotten some expertise, and probably be able to pivot and finally build their own thing given more resources (*cough*moreVCfunding*cough*).
__alexs 4 days ago [-]
The problem is that people are not listening to each other. Part of this is just working together is hard, but a bigger part is that there is status associated with being "in charge" of things as founder. The desire to feel like you are controlling the outcome and people need to take instruction and direction from you rather than working together to find a path through the forest.
cm11 4 days ago [-]
People have different strengths, but I consistently see teams that have people who are decent or better at their non-expert skills and their comments play a very small role in the discourse. Sometimes they speak up more and sometimes not, a lot of them manage to (learn to) just not care. I think there are many teams where the "expert" is not actually better at their role than the other team members.
I mostly see the leaders or the product people telling the engineers or designers that they don't understand business—implying that the latter aren't reasonable people who can advocate for things that balance the various dynamics that have been brought up in a meeting, that their view results from only considering the thing technically or aesthetically. It's a hand-wavey maneuver that's always there, said without specifics. This is particularly so given you've provided specs and designs and they rarely show business or market analysis. I've worked with many PMs to propose our work to stakeholders—they swear to the audience they've done the business work, but in preparing the presentation, they just googled a couple very broad things (one example, "the collaboration market is a $70B market"). I've worked with others, who I've tried to learn from, to show or point me to some basics of that analysis and they didn't know.
Product managers and product people in general have very little background in product management. It's not a degree or anything. Sometimes they come from backgrounds that are helpful, but we oddly have junior and entry level ones. This doesn't make that much sense, given they are formal or informal leaders of teams. What could they be bringing to the table? A (sad) exception is when access to meetings or information is gatekept, so then they're bringing that. Sometimes it's argued that PMs are good at seeing across things, but that has not been my experience. The problem with the each person is an expert in their own field is that in a lot of teams, the expert is frequently not better at their thing. The decision maker is not actually better at business or seeing across things or making decisions.
ranyume 4 days ago [-]
Your solution is to fire CEOs, shareholders and only make employee-owned businesses? I mean I'm on board.
dexterdog 4 days ago [-]
Sounds great until a hard decision has to be made.
PhageGenerator 4 days ago [-]
Just because a business is employee owned that does not mean it lacks leadership.
mpyne 4 days ago [-]
Nothing is stopping employees from banding together to create these obviously-superior businesses right now and eating the VCs' lunch. Right?
whstl 4 days ago [-]
This is incorrect. Concentration of wealth is definitely stopping them.
Most people can’t just stop working and start working for no cash.
I might be missing some obvious sarcasm, though!
mpyne 4 days ago [-]
The worker-owned businesses that are more effective will do a better job of concentrating wealth though, as they don't have to pay investors back dividends or participate in stock buybacks.
Software in general is a field quite compatible with initial self-funding, in ways you can't say for other industries.
But even still, investors threw away gobs of money on clearly unsustainable businesses like NFTs, and capitalism in general is happy to sell people the rope they will use to hang capitalists, so it's not even impossible to find investors if you absolutely need them.
Pair the lack of ongoing payments to investors or lenders with the superior execution of worker-led organizations, and companies such as these should pretty clearly mop up their competitors saddled with non-value-added executive management and non-value-added investors.
That is, assuming these roles don't provide any value to companies.
ryanbrunner 1 days ago [-]
There's some natural experiments that show that this happens, and is successful, when funding dries up a little. The early to mid 2000s were marked by a huge amount of bootstrapped companies that were quite successful. But VCs can distort a market to a huge degree and have huge effects on the labour market and even things like sales by preferring insider deals and introductions that it can crowd out smaller companies who can't outspend the VC-led companies.
whstl 2 days ago [-]
> The worker-owned businesses that are more effective will do a better job of concentrating wealth though, as they don't have to pay investors back dividends or participate in stock buybacks.
That’s only close to possible if we start with the assumption that all businesses are billion dollar businesses.
This is also unrelated with the possibility to bootstrap a business without money.
fridental 4 days ago [-]
[flagged]
singpolyma3 4 days ago [-]
CEOs are employees...
sarchertech 4 days ago [-]
Except that they usually sit on the board and frequently chair the board.
riazrizvi 4 days ago [-]
Fundamentally they are not sufficiently attached to the people's reason for using an oven. They are only attached to the goal of staying alive and making money. And when the balance shifts slightly more to the users need, the whole operation and reason for existing in every one in the company shifts in a way that makes it look like a rare and weird company that people generally don't have a frame of reference for. Most people wouldn't recognize such an entity if they saw it at this founding stage. It all starts with the right founder/s.
post-it 4 days ago [-]
The fundamental problem is that reality has a surprising level of detail (as described in an article by the same name). The founder is the same kind of guy that believes the government should just get rid of inefficiencies.
eapressoandcats 4 days ago [-]
It seems to start with the fact that the founder doesn’t understand the business domain at all:
How do people actually buy ovens?
What actually matters for customers, not what do they say matters?
Who are the competitors and why do you think you can actually do better than them in at least some niche?
What culture actually works for an oven producing company?
lsaret1257 4 days ago [-]
Isn’t a large part of fundamental problem the lack of clarity and mental discipline to stay focused on MVP and if it’s clear it’s necessary then pivot but still stay focused? It seems clear to me that real problem is lack of focus and discipline.
gedy 4 days ago [-]
Yes, but the subtle issue I've seen in companies is "MVP" easily ends up interpreted as: "add this one small thing since it's quick and easy to implement". Then before they know it you've got this mousetrap-like product that goes in all sorts of directions.
carbonguy 4 days ago [-]
A fundamental problem (let's not assume there's just one!) is this thinking right in the first paragraph:
> ... if he sells a new oven to the country’s pizza makers, pastry chefs, and bakers, he only needs to capture 10% of the market to become a billionaire.
i.e. the founder assumes that "ovens" is a single $10b-sized market, and it isn't, because reality has a surprising amount of detail (as sibling comment also notes).
You could interpret this whole story as a saga of very inefficient oven market(s) research, the end result of which is the forum post at the end:
> On the forum an old user warns “Make sure that you support rotating bases day 1”.
lucas_t_a 4 days ago [-]
> I think it’s the disconnect. Each persona is an expert in their own field but is completely oblivious to other critical areas.
its because the story just makes that assumption.
stickfigure 4 days ago [-]
Balance the power between business, engineering, and sales. I suspect this is at least partially why PG likes founders with an even equity split.
charm137 4 days ago [-]
There are two fundamental problems: one is the inability to admit mistakes and shed the false aura of omniscience in front of customers, investors or employees. The second (almost a corollary of the first) is overpromising and, as a result, underdelivering because those who face the customers/investors want to appear infallible.
phtrivier 4 days ago [-]
This article could have been written 20 years ago (source : I was there), probably 50 years ago, and will probably be written for ever. (Although future éditions will have fun about AI.)
What I would love is to read more of the story from the perspective of the salesperson (we're all too sympathetic to the engineers, and potentially ceo - but I suspect their part of the story goes beyond "I'll just say yes to everything and cash my variable share of the deal". Otherwise, pour rational next move would be to all become salesperson and build oven on the side for fun.)
Also, I would love to read the perspective from the customer side ? ("What do you mean they sell oven that don't rotate ? We clearly specified that we needed an ISO-98765 compliant oven !!! OF COURSE it has to rotate !! why did the boss just went with the cheapest supplier again ?")
Or even the perspective from BigOven ("guys ! I read on linked in that this little startup has built a candle button, why don't we have that already ?")
More seriously - do you know of startups that got away with salespersons saying "no, sorry, we can't make rotating ovens, you should see our competition, or come back in three years." Aren't those dead as dodos, by virtue of not having any customer to pay the bill ?
engeljohnb 4 days ago [-]
I'm a healthcare worker, so I'm not immersed in this world at all. I can only speak as person who has to use the oven, but doesn't get to pick which oven is purchased.
My bosses don't buy the ovens that are the most dependable, the most efficient, nor ones that are even compatible with the other steps in the cooking process.
They're impressed by the AI oven that cooks the pizza mostly right 30-40% of the time. "It'll be more consistent if you let the oven decide how long to cook." But we ignore that because of how stupid it is.
They buy ovens that suck because sales people impress them with baking jargon they don't understand. At least, that's how it comes off when they talk about it. I'm sure getting a good deal is a much bigger factor than they say.
They don't eat pizza. They can't even tell whether it's burnt. They tell me "soon the oven will do everything for us and you won't be needed."
They don't seem to comprehend that an oven can't knead dough or mix ingrdients. And that's even ignoring the fact that the auto-cook features are wrong except in the best of conditions.
The ovens break constantly because of the humidity levels needed to keep the dough nice. They spend more on repairs than they ever did on the ovens. We keep telling them to get the moisture-resistant ovens. They say it's too expensive.
ryandrake 4 days ago [-]
It's amazing how much of the world runs on confident CEOs convincing gullible investors to give them money and confident salespeople convincing gullible customers to buy their junk. I wish I re-did my character creation and put all my skill points into charisma.
simpaticoder 4 days ago [-]
No. When the chips are down and your back is to the wall, I don't want the charisma guy, I want the indefatigable reality guy.
olelele 4 days ago [-]
The art world is the same. Plus all the rich nepo babies who put on their own shows and can afford to lose money their entire life..
Tactile6700 4 days ago [-]
Seller here. There’s no justifying the sales fails in this story. It’s strictly cautionary.
In this story specifically they needed to bring technical stakeholders to Mallorca.
fwipsy 4 days ago [-]
"Aren't those dead as dodos, by virtue of not having any customer to pay the bill ?"
Not if they're building inverting ovens for another big corporation. If you do one truly worthwhile thing better than everyone else, do you still need to chase after marginal opportunities to stay afloat? I'm sure there are many, many small companies (not "startups") who are just quietly filling a niche.
dirkc 4 days ago [-]
For me the worst scenario is when a kitchen sink of non-existent functionality the customer never asked for was sold. And in all likelihood it will never be used. But some project manager is hellbent on getting it through the pipeline and checked off!
I (maybe idealistically) believe that when you give the people building agency and connect them with the end-user, you get better outcomes.
mepiethree 4 days ago [-]
from my friends in sales, sales perspective could be: going from meeting to meeting just getting yelled at.
- previous customer yells at you for not delivering required features. You ask the engineer about the status of that feature
- engineers write a manifesto on #general complaining about you for asking them about the status of the new feature
- PM calls you in to yell at you for trying to jump the roadmap
- you start prepping for weekly call with the CEO. at least doubled your numbers this quarter!
- while you're prepping you get a response to one of your cold emails from the day prior, someone calling you "gauche" and "annoying"
- go into CEO meeting. CEO yells at you for being 80% under the quota, because the psychotic quota was set to 10x last year's numbers.
- long day! go home. husband yells at you for working late
etc.
phtrivier 4 days ago [-]
Yeah, sales take part in the blame game too, otherwise they would miss on the fun. I don't see many salesperson quit their job to become carpenters, though, so maybe the huge paychecks help. Go figure.
That being said, engineers usually don't complain about being asked for the status of the feature.
What we complain about is being asked why the feature we never committed to deliver is still not there yet.
Even worse if we get cornered into uttering words that are then ret-conned into a commitment.
(A very "efficient" techniques I've heard of if for salesperson to "ask the same question over and over again with enough variations until the engineer and PMs cave." May be helpful if you have already decided to answer "yes" to the feature request / RFP checkbox anyway. Doesn't end well for most people, but sometime a quota gotta be quota-ed....)
xg15 4 days ago [-]
I found the part about the engineer's motivation interesting:
> The founder offers [the engineer] 20% of the company and total freedom to build the perfect oven. The salary isn’t great, but there’s the promise: [...] And something more important than money: he’ll finally get to build the oven of his dreams.
That turned out to be a complete lie. Not necessarily a deliberate one - I think it's quite possible both the engineer and the founder were initially believing it - but it was still a situation that never existed in that way.
Essentially, they weren't aware of all the constraints that existed for their oven design and then mistook a situation where the constraints were unknown with one where there were no constraints at all and they could just build whatever they wanted. But the real constraints were set by the market, investors and corporate customers and those were already there before they even stated the company.
(I don't think it means you have to submit to those slavishly and can never bring anything of your actual vision into your products, but it feels naive to be completely unaware of them.)
nikanj 4 days ago [-]
It's some variant of chesterton's fence, where you believe all of these huge, established companies in a space are just stupid and refuse to release a product thats 10x better
stickfigure 4 days ago [-]
This situation does exist though; otherwise startups and new products would never succeed. Big companies have blind spots.
Netflix, Google, Airbnb, Uber, Slack, the iPhone, Github, Stripe, Dropbox. Big players at the time could have built their products, but didn't.
iamjackg 4 days ago [-]
How many of those are "the exact same product, but better" though? Definitely the iPhone, and possibly Slack. Everything else you listed was a drastic change in the way an existing service (taxis, home media, backups) was delivered or priced, to the point where they feel like either an entirely different product (or an unsustainably priced one that wins by virtue of being cheaper at first, see Uber and Airbnb).
I'm not fundamentally disagreeing with you -- but I think there are some things where "everybody has clearly been doing this wrong the whole time" doesn't pass the smell test: ovens have been around for millennia, including through the whole industrial revolution and recent exponential modernization of technology.
BoxFour 4 days ago [-]
> Everything else you listed was a drastic change in the way an existing service (taxis, home media, backups) was delivered or priced, to the point where they feel like either an entirely different product
Doesn't this still line up with the original point though?
The incumbents had the exact same opportunity to capitalize. Blockbuster could've leaned into streaming hard before Netflix.
I do think that's become a bit harder recently, though, so the original point is slightly less relevant (though obviously still exists, see for example OpenAI vis-a-vis DeepMind). Big companies are much faster on chasing trends, even if they end up amounting to not much. See crypto, for example. I do think part of that reason is because the current wave of companies capitalized where incumbents faltered, so they're desperate not to make the same mistake.
stickfigure 4 days ago [-]
Google was definitely "exact same product, but better". It was a search box.
However, I think Anova would be a better direct counterpoint. They started in sous vide, replacing existing products that did the same thing but better. But now they are literally trying to replace ovens. That effort started after the Electrolux acquisition in 2017, but they do seem to be pretty successful. A friend of mine really likes their steam oven, and if I had more space in the kitchen, I would be tempted.
nikanj 4 days ago [-]
But what were the huge, established companies that had refused to deliver a better product before Google came along?
esprehn 4 days ago [-]
Yahoo. They very nearly bought Google too, but refused the initial $1m offer and then bid too low the second time. Kind of hilarious to see how that played out over time.
Yahoo had two failed attempts to acquire Google; in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin approached Yahoo to sell their nascent search engine for $1 million, but Yahoo declined the offer.[37][38]
In 2002, when Terry Semel entered into negotiations to purchase Google. Google was reportedly seeking a price of $5 billion. After weeks of negotiation, Yahoo's final offer was $3 billion, a figure that Google's leadership rejected, leading them to terminate the deal.
Altavista, Yahoo, AskJeeves, Excite.com, something Rocket. It was a long time ago and I've forgotten the rest.
ShroudedNight 4 days ago [-]
Lycos
iamjackg 4 days ago [-]
You're right. I should have included Google in the list!
ValentineC 4 days ago [-]
This comment reminded me of the James Hoffmann video on the Philips Baristina coffee machine [1].
Philips is in no way strapped of engineering talent, but they can still design the occasional bad product, when there are many alternatives at similar price points that are better, like the Sage Barista Express.
This is very insightful. I would be interested in reading an elaboration of your thoughts on this, particularly the role of BigCos and startups and the core nature of the problem in striking out on your own.
ogoffart 4 days ago [-]
Similar story here.
Even though our ovens actually work fine, the problem is a new competitor: OpenOven. Their oven is completely free, and on the Italian forum everyone talks about them. It has even way more buttons than ours (most don't work very well, but the community loves it).
We almost sold to MrBaguette, one of the biggest bakery chains in the world, as they wanted new oven supplier for their next generation of kitchen. Their chef tried our oven and loved it. But in the end they went with the pricier one from Corporate Oven, because some VP thought we were too small and worried we wouldn't supply them in 20 years.
hwh 4 days ago [-]
I started OpenOven in my free time of which I had a lot when I was still studying law. Ovens were always something I was interested in and I created FunkyPizzaHeater, as it was named when I started it, only to play around with the tech. I published it on the Italian Oven forums and it really hit a nerve, there were immediately 2 people who took the design a bit further. People tried building them and posted photos, there was a lot of discussion and eventually we agreed on a new name and moved the OpenOven project to github. It was still a project for oven enthusiasts who liked lots of buttons, until it was miraculously featured by a slightly weird but lovable YouTuber with 2 million subscribers who suggested OpenOven to anyone to finally get rid of corporate big oven.
jenadine 4 days ago [-]
I just saw the news that you raised another 1.2 billion. Congrats!
If I may ask how do you actually plan to make money? Because as far as I can tell, you're still losing a lot of money on every oven you give away.
marvinstrauch 4 days ago [-]
Uncomfortably accurate, but a fantastic read. Somewhere between the candle button and "It doesn't rotate clockwise" I stopped laughing and started remembering.
sgallant 4 days ago [-]
Agreed. This could be a story about my last startup... A good reminder.
BalinKing 4 days ago [-]
Welcome to HN. Just a heads up that, from the site guidelines[0]:
> Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.
(I'm not a mod or anything; I just noticed that most of your comments have been flagged/killed, and I suspect this might be why.)
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
johnfn 4 days ago [-]
I don’t see anything in there about not commenting on whether the author is using an LLM?
fragmede 4 days ago [-]
That's covered under
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
If there are specific tells that the text has been AI generated, point them out! A lazy drive by of "that's AI!" doesn't teach anything.
johnfn 4 days ago [-]
That also isn't saying "don't say this is an LLM". If the guidelines didn't want us to say someone is an LLM, it would explicitly say "don't say someone is an LLM". It wouldn't hint at it in an indirect way.
FWIW I do find it somewhat useful to have someone point out "this is an LLM" - I don't always have my AI detector on and I appreciate it when other people do. And when someone says particular text was LLM generated I need to go back and think about whether I believe it a bit harder.
clan 5 days ago [-]
This was such a funny and refreshing read. Especially to find on this VC fuelled forum.
There was so much truth in this on a Dilbertesque level. If you can learn from this you are winning.
I am not saying "VC bad". I am saying it is a sharp-edged tool which you need to wield with great care. This humorous piece really points out the pitfalls.
Worth the read - do not just lurk here in the comment section (as I usually do!)
weitendorf 4 days ago [-]
I had the opposite reaction, this felt like a story that was literally purpose-built for pandering the hn audience without saying anything interesting.
Good fiction teaches you something you hadn't seen before, or challenges your perspective, or articulates a point of view or personality that you had never before considered. If it's just "some guy went to work and it sucked and he was right and everyone else was wrong and the Green People did classic Green People bullshit", and there's nothing else complicated or humanizing it, and no real-world lesson or stranger-than-fiction details to it, then what value does it have?
Like, what would happen if you asked a redditor with 10 years of experience reading about startups, but no real exposure to that culture/experience beyond the comment section, to write a story summarizing the consensus opinion on reddit of how startups typically work? Of course, because it's made up it's not wrong, but it exists entirely within the socially-contingent reality of the Internet Consensus.
In the real world there's politics, inter-personal relationships, personalities and personality flaws, and too much detail for "startup flails around" to be something you can reduce to "the startup flailed around". Of course it did, but why and how? A story that says "you know how it goes in all the other stories? yeah, that" or "there was a guy like you and he was good, and all the other guys were idiots and they were bad" has no point
prime_ursid 4 days ago [-]
Nah, I disagree. I can see why you think this is another piece glorifying engineers at the expense of the business. However, as a technical founder in a former life, I saw a handful of mistakes that the engineers made. Lack of focus, lack of pushback, poor management of the engineering team, lack of product thinking, lack of connection to and empathy for the end user. I could find more if I re-read it.
I found this piece to contain more layers of detail than the usual feel-good dunk-on-bean-counters rants.
clan 4 days ago [-]
I grant you that it might pander to a certain audience.
You are 100% correct on good fiction.
I have the feeling that you will not like Franz Kafka.
Without elevating this piece to that level I think we can still agree to disagree on what good fiction is.
Or maybe your humor is better aligned with the socially-contingent reality of Franz.
But your perspective is valued. I need to shake of my bias and remember that there are no easy wins. For each point there is a counter. And I find it hard to argue against yours as my bias makes your stance feel very dismissive. Everything then turns into wedge issues.
I would have preferred an argument based on why the piece was flawed not how. Then I could counter with my experience and we could have had a conversation.
Enough Internet for me today! ;-)
HelloNurse 4 days ago [-]
One of the points is that, for a startup, not flailing around is very difficult and unlikely: these patterns of failure and "classic bullshit" are the universal norm. This piece "articulates a point of view or personality that you had never before considered": that you and your startup are no better than the characters in the tale, and equally doomed.
weitendorf 4 days ago [-]
Yes, that's the Internet Consensus and the reddit comment section every time a startup doing anything is mentioned.
You should never take a risk, business people are all evil and stupid, you should treat every employment or business opportunity as purely transactional because they'll do the same to you, there's nothing you can do about your job or employment, the only way to win is to cheat because everyone else is doing it, the key to happiness is educating other there's not really any cause and effect involved in the way things work unless you, personally, already know it. Just, you shouldn't do anything unless you understand everything about it, and if you don't it's not your fault.
> not flailing around is very difficult and unlikely
This is literally the defining trait of startups. What makes it stupid is that it's always more complicated than "engineer guy did everything he could but got screwed in the end" and that in real life, sometimes people do actually make money or establish businesses because of decisions they made, and conversely that there are real causes and effects behind things that don't go the way you want them to. Telling a story that doesn't contradict in anyway with consensus (so, directionally correct but always wrong) opinion has no point in the same way that there is no point telling a story where a knight rescues a princess by journeying through the kingdom making friends and overcoming challenges, then confronts the evil guy and kills him, the end. This is just that, but "the shady business guy and the screwed engineers"
smugglerFlynn 4 days ago [-]
Sadly it is not unique to VC. Many in-house products of large companies follow exact same story: sunk cost fallacy, investing in expectation management instead of the product itself, risky and expensive bets dressed as 'MVPs', riding on perpetual promises etc.
6LLvveMx2koXfwn 4 days ago [-]
Yeah because developers never wrote a line in POC which made it to prod ;)
pockybum522 4 days ago [-]
Agreed, I have no experience with VC anything, but I was still nodding along the whole time as I was reading.
restlake 4 days ago [-]
same. substitute VC with upper management and I (corporate dev through and through) became more queasy as I read. product and strategic mismanagement is the real deal regardless of the source of capital
alias_neo 4 days ago [-]
Interesting you found this funny. I didn't find it funny at all, my response at the end was somewhere between a sigh and a gasp.
- Mario
clan 4 days ago [-]
Yeah. I find it important to laugh at the absurdities of life. I found this to be a home-run (albeit light-weight).
It really surprised me how it seems to have polarized people. I never seem to learn.
move-on-by 4 days ago [-]
I remember sitting in on a sales meeting early in my career. I kept quiet, but afterwards I complained to my manager that they were selling features that didn’t exist and conflicted with core concepts of the product. My manager told me that was how sales were made. I left the company not long after, I was already disgruntled prior to that discussion.
I’ve seen the same thing everywhere I go. I don’t have the disposition to be in sales, but I periodically daydream of making huge commissions by straight up bullshitting people. There seems to be no downside.
chasd00 4 days ago [-]
I work in consulting and have been in many projects where the client was sold promises and features that don’t exist in reality. If I had a firm I would have a rule that whoever sells a project worth > $5M would also be responsible for delivering it.
_matt_ 4 days ago [-]
And consequently, you'd most likely have no projects worth > $5M :)
germinalphrase 4 days ago [-]
Or link sales commission to delivery success, and have no sales people...
estetlinus 4 days ago [-]
How is that company doing today?
I think there’s a balance to it. You have to meet the customer, and also understand your boundaries. I’ve sold non-existent features that I was unsure if I could deliver, but always solved it since I’m good at smooth talking. I’ll make sure what I deliver brings value, and keep a dialogue with the client. Sales relations are rarely static from my experience.
DANmode 4 days ago [-]
> There seems to be no downside.
If you don’t see the value of your own word, I can’t give it back to you.
move-on-by 4 days ago [-]
This is just one of the many reasons I don't have the disposition to be in sales
dolebirchwood 4 days ago [-]
I was doing contract work last year for a young solo founder, and he promised a feature to a big customer who only signed up because of this one feature. It was a feature he vibecoded and was able to demo in ways that made it look like it was working, when in reality it was a buggy POS. The customer was going to go live on the platform in a few weeks, and this kid expected me to work over my pre-planned holiday to actually get this (frankly rather complex) feature built properly. I told him good luck, ended the contract, and enjoyed my holiday. No time for that BS.
icegreentea2 4 days ago [-]
I like this part:
The founder gets angry. He promised the VCs 10% of Spain’s oven market. The entire market. “We can’t sacrifice any of them.”
It’s not just greed. The 5 million was raised with the entire market on the slide. The founder isn’t choosing between right and wrong: he’s choosing which promise to break.
I wonder what the author had in mind when he wrote "which promise to break". Is the founder thinking about his promises to the VCs? Or thinking between the VC and customers?
I think this is the most human moment of the entire story. Everything else is pretty standard tropes (and just like everyone in this chain, these tropes ring very very true). They're almost systemic issues.
But this is a moment where the one person who is supposed to actually have agency (the founder!) actually has a choice. I don't want to nitpick the technicalities of the choice (it seems pretty straightforward to me that getting to 10% of total market would more than justify multiple product lines), but the psychology here.
Why is the founder uncomfortable breaking promises to investors, but more comfortable selling a garbage product? Is he just hopeful?
rdbl27 4 days ago [-]
He's coldly rational:
The investors gave him $5 million. Large commitment, large risk.
Each customer gives him 15k per unit. Even a rare large customer who buys 100 ovens gives him 150k. Small commitment, small risk.
If he breaks his promise to the investors, he can't raise more money easily. It will be very hard to find another $5 million.
If he breaks his promise to the customers with a garbage product, he can more easily find a replacement customer for the much smaller risk.
icegreentea2 4 days ago [-]
From a rational standpoint, I don't understand how investors could feel betrayed by a pivot that involves creating two ovens to eventually allow the founder to capture 10% of the market. Functionally, I can't imagine a single investor actually caring about these details. They don't care about the number of buttons, or if it can do wedding cakes, or whatever. They care that the founder and team demonstrates competence in their decision making and execution.
If a founder is able to spin and control both the loss of a major potential customer, and the low customer satisfaction rate (weak follow up from pilots) to the investors, I simply cannot imagine that doing 2 product lines is that much of a big deal.
More personally, I'd feel that if it truly were a coldly rational decision, the founder would feel confident in defending his choices (at least against any initial suggestions to the contrary) without resorting to anger.
spopejoy 4 days ago [-]
The founder portrait is surprisingly sympathetic given what a train wreck is being described. This one stood out for me:
> The founder has it all figured out: the problem was never the plan. The problem was the execution
"Execution" being one of those magic business words, I've said this exact thing but only once lampooned thusly did it dawn on me how psychotic it is. If VC-funded startups are almost by definition about "a big vision", then the vision is never wrong -- a self-consuming logic answered by the magic of Execution.
Interestingly, what is ignored there is the founder is also the CEO here, so if the execution was bad ... shouldn't he be fired?
avsn 4 days ago [-]
Too close to the home, ouch. It’s such a microcosm of things. I can imagine people reading this going “ah, the founder was right, it’s those damn nerds” or “at least WE generated sales” and so on. The more you do startups the more it seems that the time is indeed a flat circle.
hitekker 4 days ago [-]
> When he gets home at night, he argues for hours on Italian forums about which type of oven is best. The Italian forums are, to him, the ultimate source of oven-truth.
This detail, among several others, is subtle but deeply fateful.
gherkinnn 4 days ago [-]
> A month later, Mario leaves the company. [...] In the retro, it gets written down as a “learning.”
That hurts and exemplifies everything I hate about the industry. Humans lost on a Kanban board, abstracted away and covered in business speak.
reactordev 4 days ago [-]
This is so well written. What would really be icing on the cake would be for Mario to join another oven company that had the same premise (or similar vein) where he got to experience that all over again. Either way, there’s always a starry eyed graduate that thinks this is my ticket.
anonu 4 days ago [-]
> When Everything Is Urgent, Nothing Is
The most resonant line for me. This line for me is about how good project management meets team culture. You want a high performant team: one that remains focused and motivated - but the goals are carrots, not sticks.
stevetron 4 days ago [-]
He should have started his own pizza restaurants with his own ovens. Maybe then he'd learn more about baking. Especially pizza.
Restaurants wouldn't even need dish washers if they switched to paper plates. The pots and pans have to be washed by hand anyway. I was a dishwasher in a restaurant when I was only 14. I'd work a 12-hour shift on Saturdays because none of the 'real' dishwashers were available. The only perk I got was that I could have an occasional pipsi on-th-house. I also worked as a young adault in my father's restaurant. I'd come home from 'my' job every day, working on an electronics production line only to be shown the huge pile of dishes that had accumulated during the day. The production line paid me $2.50 per hour. My dad didn't pay me anything. But he let me park my 20-foot trailer in his back yard, which was adjacent to the restaurant property, and in the winter I had to refill my propane every 3 days.
arendtio 4 days ago [-]
I am always a bit pissed when I see people using 'MVP' in a different way than how Eric Ries uses it (I know there are other definitions, but I never saw one that made more sense).
> First, a definition: the minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort or in other words building the most minimum version of their product that will still allow them to learn. [1]
There is no hypothesis to be validated or learning connected to those prototypes in the story, and I think using the definition by Eric Ries would change the story quite a bit.
It's flabbergasting how this story is close to the reality. Bookmarked, I would love to see it printed.
sebastianconcpt 4 days ago [-]
I was waiting for the plot twist and it didn't come, so its genre is: horror.
ArcHound 5 days ago [-]
Brilliant. What I liked are the characters - it's hard to make every character motivation reasonable and so well communicated.
What I think is a bit of a missed opportunity is for the product to fail with "the pizza|cake|pastry is half-baked" and so customers still have to do the rest of the job anyway.
nostratas 4 days ago [-]
This one hits a little too close to home. I left my company around 9 months ago due to being "Mario" at my old company. It was a good decision because it ended up being a sinking ship. I wish I left much sooner, but I didn't know the red flags at the time. An expensive lesson for me
denis-stable 4 days ago [-]
Do you mind sharing why it was expensive lesson?
nostratas 4 days ago [-]
I think the opportunity cost for not moving to a different gig really hurt me, since AI/LLMs were just about to explode at the time I noticed the red flags. I chose to stay because I strongly believed in the mission of my last company (aka really wanted to make that perfect oven), and had some misguided sense of loyalty. I ended up staying a few years.
A wiser version of myself would have cut my losses after at most one year, or much sooner, especially after noticing the red flags. This is something I'm keeping in mind for my next gig.
dijksterhuis 4 days ago [-]
learned a similar lesson at last company. should have left after six months as "lead" engineer (of two people, not really much to lead there... which is related to why i crashed and burned out, funnily enough)
i was definitely the another Engineer in my story.
thevillagechief 4 days ago [-]
Brilliant! And this isn't really just about startups. Large companies are operating the exact same way.
pockybum522 4 days ago [-]
Small ones, too!
dzonga 4 days ago [-]
you know the pamphlets passed to soldiers before war.
your article needs to be passed to engineers & I guess everyone before graduating college.
in all the satire - what our industry forgot is - how did people build/fund companies before Venture Capital ?
groundzeros2015 4 days ago [-]
> Engineering stops trying to build a good oven and starts adding buttons and features. Nobody made that decision. It just happened
I’ve found that most people hate making tradeoffs. They don’t recognize that the things they do like don’t do everything.
So If you focus too much on a customer or worse an internal stakeholder who hasn’t designed or built things, it can became a Homer Simpson designing a car situation.
satisfice 4 days ago [-]
This is inkblot test. Some will read it and see fundamental irrationality. Others will read it and say “it could have worked out if a couple of things had gone their way.”
The story could be change with just a few sentences in the middle that would turn it into the founding myth of how Globoven took 100% of the market for energy efficient portable emergency ovens for NATO military use.
tiohijazi 4 days ago [-]
I made an account just to reply to this post. Happened to me. Word per word. From the start until the end. Exactly like it is.
Angostura 4 days ago [-]
Reading this made me hyperventilate
alooPotato 4 days ago [-]
same
sbinnee 4 days ago [-]
Same here
mpetrovich 4 days ago [-]
The classic solution-in-search-of-a-problem.
If the founder had started by talking with people in the problem space, he could have discovered what problems were actually worth solving before investing any money and effort into a product.
Everything after that happened were downstream effects of creating something without a defensible reason why and for whom.
themightyquinn 4 days ago [-]
I’ve felt like this before but I think the responsibility of the founding engineer is underestimated. 20% of the company is a cofounder and a partnership. The failure was compromising on the buttons. An engineer who can say “no” is far more valuable than the one who will grind out features for a sales call.
dzink 4 days ago [-]
Here is another story: A baker who bakes for her kids every day makes an oven. She spends years perfecting it by herself with details only someone who uses this product would notice. The nuance of gold baked details in just the right places on the bread, the infusion of essences for the cakes. The precise charring on the pizzas. She goes to young founder events to meet likeminded makers and they talk about space ovens and OvenCrunch incubators fund them just on school name and ideas. But the oven maker with the kids doesn’t even get an interview. She applies with a working product and increasing sales year over year for 10 years and no interview. Her over becomes an organically growing best seller and she doesn’t need the seed money anymore. Incubator founders have spend their seed funding on fancy trips and conferences and flying over the Egyptian pyramids on instagram. The Incubator partners say they don’t fund oven makers anymore because the business is too slow to grow and consumer stuff is a tarpit.
weli 4 days ago [-]
But slow organic growth is not a hyperscaling unicorn. Who wants to invest money for a mere 50% return? We need to x100 or x1000 it for it to even be worth to invest.
dzink 4 days ago [-]
Without a large funded team the founder who knows what they are building will not build an expansion line into other areas because they can’t support the growth solo. Somebody once said funding is kerosene. You want to pour it into working fire pits, not sparklers hoping one of them will be a dynamite stick.
carlosjobim 4 days ago [-]
Slow organic growth doesn't need investments. It pays for itself from revenue. If you need investments, it means the business is gearing up to become bigger, and will have jumps in both expenses and income.
So I can't see the reason for the sarcasm. Different things.
invictati 4 days ago [-]
The sad part isn't that the mom with the kids didn't get VC funding because her startup idea isn't hypergrowth enough. It's that she ever thought she needed it in the first place.
xg15 4 days ago [-]
Ten years later: The woman's oven is still a niche product, but awareness of it is growing, because the quality is just so good. Professionals swear by it and the name is written only with the utmost reverence in the Italian (and other) forums.
The baker is happy and proud with what she could contribute to the worldwide bakers community and has made enough money that she and her family never need to worry again. There is just one problem: By now, she is getting old and none of her kids are interested in bakery or oven tech. She's also getting a steadily growing amount of offers to sell the rights to the brand.
Eventually, she caves and sells the brand and designs to BigOven. They promote her brand front and center and initially also use her design. But over time, BigOven replaces more and more parts with cheaper equivalents while keeping the overall look the same - until eventually, they replace the entire product with a stock design.
The bakers take a while to catch on (during which time BigOven makes a ton of additional money from the brand value) but eventually, the quality decline becomes impossible to ignore. Frustrated posts about corporate greed and enshittification make the rounds on the Italian forums.
"They don't make em like they used to" someone writes...
neilv 4 days ago [-]
Unrealistic.
There's no way a contemporary tech founder would offer 5% of the company to an engineer that late in the game. It would be 0.5%, and it would be ISOs at worthless pricing.
Also, for all the founder's Leadership contribution that warranted owning more than half the company, apparently they didn't know that those VCs could pressure/pay all their other companies to buy ovens. And then you simply ride that growth signal to a successful exit. Building and sustaining a viable business is a problem for seasoned professional managers, not brilliant innovators.
keynesyoudigit 3 days ago [-]
This story is so common, and while this post was a very eloquent write up, and it’d be easy to pile on “all those silly non-engineers”, it’s unhelpful for all involved.
In keeping with the metaphor, how could Engineer, Mario, or Luigi have negotiated better trade offs? I mean, working for a baker as the founder or at least on the board is huge. But what else?
Someone who’s had success critique my draft here:: I want to respect expertise without “caving”.
“I understand the goal of the organization is 10% of the oven market, and I believe in that goal, but if we focus only on pizza for a while, we hit 6%, and gain at least 25% NPS. The garlic bread, calzone, and sweet pastry markets would be easy to tackle, getting us closer to cake. Alternatively, we start with cake. If we deliver Pepepizza a cake solution that absolutely thrills them, would that buy us credibility and time?”
Wowfunhappy 4 days ago [-]
> The engineer realizes something: building an algorithm that calculates baking time for cakes, pizzas, and bread is quite a bit more complex than it looked. Every dough is its own universe. They need to hire more engineers.
Why did the engineer "who spends all day talking and arguing about ovens" not realize this sooner? Sure, "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it", but the engineer's salary wasn't great anyway; the real goal was to build "the oven of his dreams". To do that, he very much needed to understand the algorithmic complexity involved.
What I assume happened is the engineer wasn't sure whether the idea could work, and the only way to find out was to try. Well, he tried, and he found out. Oh well.
Isn't this how VC is supposed to work? Ten startups try ten ambitious ideas. Nine fail, one succeeds. The one that succeeds does well enough to make up for the nine failures. And so it goes. There was nothing wrong with the nine founders who failed. They were just unlucky, and they can try again.
I think what went wrong in the story is very simple. The company didn't "fail fast".
metalrain 4 days ago [-]
In the story they spend months to build the MVP and people don't like it. This clearly is first point where they could "fail fast", but they believe they can improve and they do.
I guess I'm thinking where is the "fail fast" that is fast enough, but also not quitting too early?
Wowfunhappy 4 days ago [-]
> In the story they spend months to build the MVP and people don't like it.
Oh, that was another problem! The story says:
>> In practice it doesn’t work very well, but it’s good enough for an MVP.
No, that's quite clearly not good enough for an MVP! If your product's core functionality—baking stuff, in this case—only works one third of the time, then your product is not viable! It is maybe a proof of concept, but certainly not a product.†
So the company never should have released an MVP, they should have kept working on their reliability problems. Which is when the engineer should have realized "alright, this isn't going to work," and the whole company needs to pivot or close up shop.
Alternately, if they ship a real MVP that can produce perfect cakes with reasonable reliability, and the customers don't like it, that would also be time to change plans.
What happened in the story is they shipped a product that obviously doesn't work, customers dislike the fact that it doesn't work, and the obvious conclusion is "well, they didn't like it because it doesn't work yet," which is true but also obvious. You didn't learn anything.
This doesn't really answer your question and I don't think a definitive answer exists (and I've never worked in this space). But, obviously, this company should have stopped sooner than they did.
---
† The only exception I can see is if you can come up with a potential customer for which "an oven that bakes correctly one third of the time" would still meet their needs. Under the scenario in the story, I don't think this exists. For, say, an AI coding agent that can run automated tests and throw away bad results, a one third success rate may still be useful in some scenarios.
ryandrake 4 days ago [-]
> No, that's quite clearly not good enough for an MVP!
I think this speaks to the other major weakness of most founders: that they are optimists to a fault. The "MVP" in the story was a colossal failure. It wasn't "good enough." It was a disaster, and they should have just stopped there. But founders wouldn't be founders if they were able to know failure when they see it.
4 days ago [-]
sbinnee 4 days ago [-]
Wow I was laughing internally. I couldn’t dare to laugh out loud because this story is too real to me. The moment I noticed that I just had to look back my life. Good read
emilsayahi 4 days ago [-]
The mistake was when they didn't just switch to selling two types of dough. They had a genuine innovation and should've squeezed as much juice out of that and moved on to finding some other innovation. You don't need to build exactly what you described to your first investors, you just need to build a valuable business for them.
sscaryterry 5 days ago [-]
Wow, this is so damn close to truth :)
k7peak 5 days ago [-]
I gave up, how did this make it to page 1 jeez.
weli 5 days ago [-]
I've been experimenting with writing longer-form content. I do agree the main point could be condensed a lot and I'm not the a great writer by far. This is kind of a rant and really cathartic for me to write after working more than 5 years on startups. Just wanted to share it.
edu 5 days ago [-]
I read it full and I loved it and bookmarked it.
It resonates with my personal experience, and your writing style is fresh and dynamic.
Thanks for sharing it, and it deserves to be on the front page and #1.
jason_s 4 days ago [-]
Really liked it, and somewhat envious that you were able to create such a well-written, cohesive piece of just about the right length. (I blog on different topics and it's so hard to keep things short and not wandering.)
bravetraveler 4 days ago [-]
Glad you did share, really enjoyed this... and I've never worked at a startup. Rings true to my hollowed corporate soul. The main difference: your peers might think they're founders; tend to forget they were acqui-hired.
ChrisMarshallNY 4 days ago [-]
I enjoyed it, but it is uncomfortably realistic.
Some folks want to gripe about everything. Life's too short to worry about them. They need to live in the world they make; not me.
achenet 4 days ago [-]
Personally, I really liked both your writing and the fact that you took the time to flesh out the main point.
Thanks for taking the time to write this up and share it ^_^
jaapz 4 days ago [-]
It's fine, don't worry about it. It's hard for me to read long form on a computer and I read your entire story.
You can't please everyone
IggleSniggle 4 days ago [-]
I loved it. It was cathartic to read, too. It's really a rather short story. There's no accounting for taste.
otherme123 4 days ago [-]
On another post from today, titled "Mystery identity of 'Green Boots' climber is finally solved after DNA test", aparently the TLDR is the name of the dead man. The rest of the article explaining how, when, why, with whom the man was there, for some people, is cruft, a total waste of reading time.
drunkboxer 4 days ago [-]
I loved every paragraph
telchior 4 days ago [-]
You're at the least a good writer. It's a lot like music (or any other artform). No matter how good the result, even if it's utterly sublime, there will be a group who doesn't enjoy it.
ares623 5 days ago [-]
Not enough "key insight", "smoking gun", "this closes the gap", "kicker" huh.
vultour 4 days ago [-]
Do you need a 7-second TikTok summary?
worik 5 days ago [-]
I loved it.
Different tastes
realo 4 days ago [-]
I would guess you are in Sales ...
bayindirh 5 days ago [-]
I mean, it's read time is 20 minutes at most. I don't think it's long or tasteless or anything.
alansaber 4 days ago [-]
Entertaining, very AI prose though.
aetherspawn 4 days ago [-]
Disagree, I assumed it was a 10 year old story because it was written in the personable style of the old internet…
plasticeagle 4 days ago [-]
It sounds very slightly AI in some places, but I think this is an example of AI tropes turning up in human writing.
Which is a shame, because it makes those constructs less pleasant to read than they used to be. If you squint, and pretend AI doesn't exist (imagine!), then maybe you might be able to enjoy them again.
It is a little bit too long though.
weli 4 days ago [-]
Really? Didn't use an llm other than to do a quick grammar check because english is not my first language.
Planktonne 4 days ago [-]
It's worth checking that your LLM actually did just do a quick grammar check, because you've got really quit a lot of LLM tells in the prose.
If it didn't make more changes than you're aware of, then you should be aware that some features of your style are common amongst LLMs, and over-use of them will alienate some percentage of your audience (even if unfairly).
Key ones to look out for:
- Staccato prose: repeated runs of short sentences (e.g. "The founder nods. He gets it. He gets all of it.")
- Negative pivots: anything with the structure of '!X; Y' (e.g. 'it’s not that nobody saw it: it’s that every week something jumped ahead of it')
These are valid linguistic features, but if you use them a lot, it sounds like AI writing, and people are wary of AI writing (because of the tidal wave of malicious, spamming & extractive actors using it). It will impact your audience.
alentodorov 4 days ago [-]
doesnt sound ai at all to me. great read.
ImHereToVote 4 days ago [-]
LLMs are often trained and evaled on English speakers in Africa so this checks out.
kevlened 4 days ago [-]
That's quite a complement to AI
Sheeny96 4 days ago [-]
I disagree, this read very non-AI prose to me. No "its not x - it's y", or em dashes etc.
mold_aid 4 days ago [-]
"It’s not that the engineers are getting slower: it’s that every new button has to coexist with all the previous buttons."
I thought it might be intentional though? The first half reads very non-slop, and it just kind of inches its way in as the situation falls apart
mold_aid 4 days ago [-]
nvm author explains in the comment directly below this one, lol
saadatq 4 days ago [-]
Has anyone ever experienced the alternative? to building products from scratch, growing a business, without the drama?
groundzeros2015 4 days ago [-]
The only way I’ve seen it happen is to not raise money and build it yourself.
These kinds of companies make hundreds of thousands or even millions a year. But it’s too small to hear about them.
Maybe we were saved by being acquired before hiring sales. Sai knew the problem & understood customers. He'd sometimes oversell a bit, but managed it: kept pulse of capacity for new development, would ask about how hard requested features were, would feel out customer intent & guide customer adapt to what was already there
When we had our pepepizza moment, there was an understanding that it wasn't going to work, took learnings of what would be involved there, but kept focus on improving what we already had
For kafka connector we had a design partner, I got to work with them directly. They wanted 30 microsecond message processing, so didn't want json. Original ask was flatbuffers. I decided to put message formatting into a scripting layer using gopher-lua. Spent a weekend getting flatbuffers working with lua (it was buggy, opened half a dozen PRs to flatbuffers repo which got ignored). It was clearly awful having to manage flatbuffer schema files & update scripts every time schema changed. But I had alternative already made: msgpack. Throughput needed work but addressed that by creating pool of lua interpreters
Overall I overworked myself (put my hands out of commission & spent months relearning how to type on split ergo colemak-dh), but I enjoyed the work. Team was very open with each other & when performance is your selling point there's an understanding that engineering quality needs to be maintained. Sure there were parts of the system I hated, & sometimes I'd try chip away at those
Hopefully that helps, hard to say the difference, but I really feel in my work that when customer has problem I'm part of conversation. Most recently there was talk of customer wanting cold data offloaded from postgres which is what inspired https://github.com/ClickHouse/pg_clickhouse/pull/298 where we get Postgres to do most the work
Raised problems trying to mix C++ into postgres extension, decided fix was to write clickhouse-c library to replace clickhouse-cpp, there was some doubt on team about value, but demonstrated value (https://github.com/ClickHouse/pg_clickhouse/pull/254) & I appreciate my colleagues not being afraid to change their mind
There's a level of trust where instead of being assigning tasks on a board I instead work on what I think is important based on information available. Nobody was asking for wal-rus, but I know my fleet
ClickHouse Cloud similarly took route of taking its time hiring sales. Better to have a small sales team that can work directly with engineering on quality leads than overwhelming everyone so that sales becomes the enemy. Guess the difference is agency. When engineering is involved in making commitments they're invested in delivering & there's push back so sales doesn't start hallucinating features
Quite the interesting part here is that if someone adheres to taste, the oven story would never happen. The question though is does taste matter more, or the oven :)
mishellaneous 4 days ago [-]
for me, the moral of the story is that it's easier to promise things than to deliver them. or, engineering was the bottleneck.
in my experience, this is not particular to start-ups, or even software engineering.
why does this happen though?
i think it could be due to short-term thinking. like buying things with a credit card: you get the shiny new thing immediately, but the payment is diluted over time. likewise, once the sale is made, you may feel the reward immediately (though i guess it depends on the exact nature of the deal), but the work that will have to be done, will be done over time.
also, it's no wonder that the founder, or, outside start-ups, the marketing department, which specializes in promising impossible things, manages to evade the blame...
ares623 4 days ago [-]
> engineering was the bottleneck
to the Amazon river everything and anything will be a bottleneck
skydhash 4 days ago [-]
Because engineering is where ideas get materialized in reality. And reality has a surprising amount of constraints, unlike imagination. It’s “draw the rest of the horse” turned to eleven.
4 days ago [-]
HelloNurse 4 days ago [-]
Considerable arrogance is required to think you can improve on mature products enough to conquer a large market share. Such arrogance should be supported by having, if not a demonstrably fantastic prototype, at least an obviously good idea; otherwise you are following the example of Juicero or Theranos.
In the article, the "smart" oven is only a speculation (maybe it works, and maybe someone will pay for it) and as such it is appropriate as a relatively low effort and low risk experiment on the part of an established oven maker (develop rudimentary automation and offer it as a very mildly disruptive feature at a modest price increase).
murphomatic 4 days ago [-]
> “But this is a startup. And startups are built with blood and sweat. Everyone here has to sacrifice. You have two weeks.”
If only this simply applied to startups. Many enterprises today still remember their startup roots a little TOO clearly.
abraxas_ 4 days ago [-]
This was an absolute delight to read. I have tried to build so many ovens in my life…
HelloNurse 5 days ago [-]
Brilliant autobiography.
owlguy_11 4 days ago [-]
> In standups he says “no blockers” and everyone moves on to the next person.
I've seen this Luigi in my standups (are people still doing these? whole other topic). Hell, I've been Luigi.
Is this unavoidable? - feels like it requires increasing amounts of deliberate concerted effort to avoid this kind of season.
When the glitter of "total freedom to build the perfect oven" patinas into the ground-hog's-day of endless tickets and breathless status updates, how do engineer-folk keep hopping back on the hamster wheel of birthday-cake features?
Asking for a friend .
SilverSlash 4 days ago [-]
This was such a great read! Thank you! Too bad Oven Inc never got more headcount. Otherwise the engineers could've had a day hackathon week while the managers and founder went to a retreat for a strategy offsite.
Karthick81 4 days ago [-]
The best tools/businesses are coming from domain experts who vibecode, not anyone who can vibecode — because the ones who are not from that domain have not really experienced the painpoints to know what the industry needs, even when they work with a dev team requirements get lost in translation.
The catch: domain experts don't know what they don't know about shipping. The fix — vibecoders build it, dev team hardens it for production.
sumitkumar 4 days ago [-]
Can you please give some examples of the best tools/businesses which are being built like this? Genuinely curious. I know the vibe tech is really good but I don't know of any upstarts using it, everyone cool is building/distributing the vibe tech. There are some games/copycats but nothing production grade in my radar.
itomato 3 days ago [-]
" Ovens Inc. doesn’t live off selling ovens (for now). It lives off raising rounds. And rounds are raised with projections, and projections are manufactured out of whatever sales promises. The “No problem” people are also the only life raft."
Ever try make a product using Google Glass?
thesurlydev 4 days ago [-]
Best line: "Engineering has no time to stop and rethink their approach, because stopping isn’t in the backlog."
Aaron_NW 3 days ago [-]
Nice storytelling!
The leader never made the hard choice about who the product was for and what problem actually needed to be solved. A smaller product that works well for a market is usually better than one that is trying to solve for everything.
artyom 3 days ago [-]
Painfully accurate. I've been "the engineer", "the new engineer", Mario and/or Luigi at some point in my career. I can attest, this kind of behavior is pervasive across the industry.
ivansmf 4 days ago [-]
The technology is amazing. The marketing around it is a decade ahead of its capability, and the pushiness to make LLMs do what they still can't is just irritating. The question to me is "who is seeing the goal posts?" And the answer is "the marketing department of whoever sells it".
podgorniy 4 days ago [-]
This writing is too realistic to feel joy about it. Thanks for putting it together (and then to the HN)
annjose 4 days ago [-]
Such a great read! I kept on nodding and chuckling the whole time reading it. I can see myself as the founder, especially 'spending time in the oven forums' lol.
I went to the /blog route to see other posts by the author, but alas, there is only this one! And that's a gem.
imjonse 4 days ago [-]
While the majority of comments are absolutely right in recognizing and lamenting such situations plaguing our industry, let's not forget this is an ultimate first world problem. It can be stressful and frustrating but we are a privileged bunch to be able to call this 'pain'.
ludamad 4 days ago [-]
Startups and this kind of business trap are not unique to the first world. As well, your comment is sort of generic isn't it? I could imagine it on virtually every post here
oenton 4 days ago [-]
Yes, whatever your situation there's always someone who has has it worse than you. Your comment does not add anything of substance to this conversation. It's also flawed. Sharing and talking about (first world) problems like these is important, lest they become the 'norm' and no longer a 'problem'.
Anecdotally I remember 1 hour to 90 minute lunches being the norm 10 years ago. Now, taking more than 30 minutes feels like I need to play 'catch up', primarily because the workload and expectations of SWEs has increased dramatically since then. The pay? Not commensurate. And that's even if you include the short lived post-Covid spike in salaries.
"Be grateful for what you have" gets old quick, especially when leaders (and I use that term loosely) use any opportunity to take more and more.
micromacrofoot 4 days ago [-]
it's a more complex version of what happens in the third world too, it's not about class it's about people
groundzeros2015 4 days ago [-]
What? Bro, this is our life.
You don’t have to be beaten and starving to have a perspective and story to tell.
ngm7 4 days ago [-]
Being able to say no, across the company!
Having an engineering team which is allowed to say No the founder.
Having a sales team which is allowed to say No to the customer.
Having founders who are allowed to say No to themselves, sit patiently and figure the root-causes.
muragekibicho 4 days ago [-]
Is this how they view us? Like yeah. I'm going to spend all night arguing with the Haskell lovers (that's a slur in my books) on Reddit, but it's not my hobby. Rather, responsibility demands I direct these functional programmers away from the devil.
silexia 4 days ago [-]
Don't forget that they get awarded 3 patents early for very broad things like "heating" and then proceed to sue dozens of legitimate companies and get six figure settlements because fighting it would be even more expensive.
orliesaurus 4 days ago [-]
This was actually so good to read. It really reminded me of so many of my past experiences at startups.
AJRF 4 days ago [-]
If I didn't laugh i'd cry.
madradavid 4 days ago [-]
I have started a number of (failed) companies and this, this article summarizes the last 15 years of my life.
A software dev trying to play startup founder.
To whoever wrote this , thank you for so eloquently articulating something I’d failed to put into words.
mdavid626 4 days ago [-]
It’s very simple. Everbody just wants to make money.
Startups have nothing to do with innovation or making the world a better place.
It feels like it’s about creating the bubble, inflating it and cashing out before it bursts.
notatoad 4 days ago [-]
I don’t think that’s true. Some people really do have product ideas that they want to share with the world.
The problem is that those people are really bad at making money, and have a hard time competing with the people whose motivation is money.
mdavid626 4 days ago [-]
That’s exactly what I mean as well. Of course behind startups the basic idea is to innovate. But this gets lots, because most of people just want to make money. VC-s don’t care about innovation, they care that the money they put in, comes back.
It’s not evil, it’s just how money-oriented society works.
wxw 4 days ago [-]
Slow clap… matches my experience in startups. And honestly, big tech as well. I think you can consider an enterprise to simply be a collection of many startups with shared revenue as funding.
vjsrinivas 4 days ago [-]
Great story. Reminded me what my professional nightmare would look like. But, I think at the end it started to thin out its allegorical premise when it started including SWE terms like Kanban and retros.
sandeepkd 4 days ago [-]
> He offers them the same deal he got: low salary, lots of freedom, the perfect oven.
This is highly relatable. The part that it hides is the "lots of hours of your life" included part.
shahzaibmushtaq 4 days ago [-]
The founder should have visited China's oven manufacturing market/industry after raising 5 million. This could have solved their first major client Pepepizza feature problem.
lilerjee 4 days ago [-]
Interesting story. This seems a true story of the author? The author understands the characters of the people in the process of business. Understanding reality is not easy.
weli 4 days ago [-]
Not a situation that happened to me per se. More of a mix of situations that have happened to me and I've seen happen to people close to me aggregated into a single metaphor.
rpdillon 4 days ago [-]
I've been working in startups since 2012 and this was a superbly crafted narrative that articulates so many of the odd circumstances that lead to inscrutable decisions in early stage companies...really well done!
orliesaurus 4 days ago [-]
Amazing job writing this up!
m3kw9 4 days ago [-]
Every feature you add to you product really explodes the amount of new states you have to take care of, in addition to the risk of diverting the core product vision
dstanko 4 days ago [-]
kind of reminds me of this: I want to build a teleport. it should look like old time phone booth, have a screen with a world map on it where I can chose the destination, and a big button with letters TELEPORT on it. when the button is pressed user is instantly transported to the desired destination.
the teleport mechanism is built in into the base of the booth, so it does not affect overall design.
zftnb666 3 days ago [-]
Shipping half-baked is fine as long as you call it MVP. Ship half-baked and call it MVP? Genius.
SaltyAstronaut 4 days ago [-]
We get so obsessed with shipping shiny features for the next pitch deck that we forget the oven actually needs to bake bread.
azhenley 3 days ago [-]
This is the best article I’ve read this year. There’s so much truth in this.
Mizza 4 days ago [-]
Ouch, that hits close to home, and it seems like it does for a lot of others out there as well.
So what's the solution? Is there a playbook that avoids these pitfalls, or is it just the cost of the spin. Ideally, something early engineers can point to when we see non-technical founders falling into familiar traps.
brickers 4 days ago [-]
My personal take:
- you need aligned incentives across the board. Sales and accounts mustn’t promise what the company can’t deliver
- people need to defend their area of expertise whilst listening to what others are saying about theirs. For me this boils down to a division between technical and business focussed. Techies need to push for non-client facing technical improvements without making everyone ignore them every time they say “technical debt”, and they need to accept that sometimes you just build shit to get business through the books. Sales/accounts need to accept that sometimes the build budget is taken up with mysterious technical drives that will be worth it. When I say “must accept” I mean accept that it must happen some percentage of the time - each case still needs to be backed up by a business case.
- ultimately this needs to come from the top - founder(s) must balance these facts and drive it through the whole organisation, and in the article they didn’t
8b16380d 4 days ago [-]
Have you ever been in a situation where this was the case? The only time I've come close, the business was a dog.
weli 4 days ago [-]
If someone has the answer I'd like to know as well. I think the most important question to ask yourself is: Where did the story go sideways? At what point what character could have prevented the disaster?
For me there is no right answer. Maybe the engineer should have been more pushy with what things not to add. Maybe the founder entrepreneur should have been realistic. Maybe sales should have not had to promise things that were not developed yet. But to each of those there is a counter-argument of why that needed to be done in that moment.
Take it as a mental exercise.
lelanthran 4 days ago [-]
> Where did the story go sideways?
When they didn't iterate on PMF with a niche client.
groundzeros2015 4 days ago [-]
A lot of these things are just inexperienced management:
- not understanding sales and properly incentivizing them
- attacking only urgent problems (urgent vs important matrix)
- not taking constraints expressed by domain experts as real. (Big companies are actually good at this.)
dijksterhuis 4 days ago [-]
> Where did the story go sideways? At what point what character could have prevented the disaster?
for me the company should never have existed in the first place. and that lies with the founder. starts with them. falls on them.
i'm biased i suppose because my part in the "10%" part of my story was finding out just how little research anyone actually did... they all just wanted to play the role of important businessmen, big brain dev, co-founder etc. etc.
thank you for writing this. i'm still trying to come back from crashing and burning at that place. i might read this a few more times as it felt like my story too. the another Engineer part touched me. that's who i was in my story. it hurt.
More often I see the opposite. 100 page pdfs that fall apart in first contact with reality.
I think it’s not about research, but it’s very hard to contribute in a field you haven’t actually had a career in.
dijksterhuis 4 days ago [-]
yeah i'd agree with you there with lack of experience. and that was definitely a thing at my place. i think it plays a part in the research stuff too. cos if without relevant experience a lot of bad assumptions get made.
"FOSS is universally unreliable" was one of such assumptions i had to push back against 5 years later. they meant academica produced software. but they assumed all foss is the same as all academica produced software.
adithyaharish 4 days ago [-]
[flagged]
nilirl 4 days ago [-]
Honest question: Does the founder end up making money this way? Can you really get rich building a failed business?
jppope 4 days ago [-]
Totally depends.
Lots of people assume that the valuable thing is the direct business, but a business can be a lot more than that. A competitor may buy you for your engineers or sales team or patents, or assets, or whatever (e.g. Siri, Motorola, etc)... and just toss the rest of the business or sell that stuff off after they have what they want. In other industries they may just buy companies for their assets. Also you never know what will happen with a pivot (e.g. twitter, slack, etc).
The bleak reality is if you can keep growing (making more money than you spend) that alone is usually desirable enough for people to keep giving you money and eventually provide an exit. Why? because it's really hard to do. Its a skill.
metalrain 4 days ago [-]
Usually no.
And I have to say that no one tries to build a failed business. Founders can be really earnest about their intentions, work harder when they see the cracks, but often it just doesn't work, they don't find the right way before it's too late.
Maybe just before the end someone tries to siphon the funds into private account or assets into their next venture, but you tend to get caught doing so.
schnatterer 3 days ago [-]
What would you say are the main lessons to be learned here for all sides?
davidbhead 4 days ago [-]
This horror story is what happens when you prioritize growth before anyone loves your product
certyfreak 4 days ago [-]
Well written and it perfectly describes reality, it got me hooked and nodding from start to finish.
z3ugma 4 days ago [-]
This is like a punch in the gut. Holy buckets. How do you prevent this? Bootstrap?
metalrain 4 days ago [-]
Only functional startups I've seen solve actual customer problem and don't try to solve all problems. Usually they have tried several things before they found one that actually is worth solving.
But everyone makes mistakes and bad deals in product development or they go out of business.
baud9600 4 days ago [-]
Daft! And very strangely true. I recognised several moments and events in the story
breadsniffer 4 days ago [-]
Why do I feel like this is the story of the average B2B SaaS YC startup?
jwsteigerwalt 4 days ago [-]
Well written. This applies much further than just equity raising startups.
pradeeproark 4 days ago [-]
Can’t say this is fiction or non-fiction. Totally depressing. Too good.
rdiddly 4 days ago [-]
This was exquisitely cringe-laden and I think I may be the Luigi figure
jickmao 4 days ago [-]
MCP for browser automation is interesting because Safari's WebKit engine is the one most AI agents can't easily drive (Playwright and Puppeteer are Chromium-first). Having an MCP server for it could fill a real gap in cross-browser testing for agent workflows.
ImHereToVote 4 days ago [-]
Wrong thread
Razengan 4 days ago [-]
Unrelated, but does anyone else remember halfbakery.com?
Oh cool it's still around!
richardfey 5 days ago [-]
The more I read into it, the more pain memory flashbacks I got. Bravo
ryanmarsh 4 days ago [-]
Ok that hurt, but seriously what's the right answer.
ssenssei 4 days ago [-]
my favorite blog post of all time... this should go in a museum
4 days ago [-]
abrookewood 4 days ago [-]
Brilliant. Brutal.
coolvision 3 days ago [-]
this is brilliant! I just went through a few years of this, very relatable
tinyhouse 4 days ago [-]
This is so well written. Well done!
stymaar 4 days ago [-]
Oh, that one hits hard on the nail.
skeletonwebs 4 days ago [-]
Spoiler: This is not about ovens.
skeletonwebs 4 days ago [-]
Spoiler: this is not about ovens.
rcgs 4 days ago [-]
Enjoyed this – very entertaining!
ac50hz 4 days ago [-]
s/oven/cms/g
9p 4 days ago [-]
I LOVE THIS!! well done.
James_K 4 days ago [-]
This could have all been solved if they added a setting for bread, pizza, or cake.
miyoji 4 days ago [-]
> The founder is very good. He builds a plan that, on paper, is flawless and airtight: manufacture a more efficient oven using new technology. Selling it is easy. Want to work more efficiently? Buy our oven. End of pitch.
Are you kidding me? Here's my business plan: manufacture faster computer chips than anyone else ever has before using new technology. Selling it is easy. Want faster computers? Buy our chips. End of pitch.
Here's my execution strategy: I'm going to hire the person who comments the most on Hackers News discussions about new chips and let him loose, then come back with a million new requirements because I never bothered to understand anything about how people want to use computer chips or how they're sold today.
My company eventually loses its only customer when it turns out that we don't know how to build faster computer chips at all.
The founder is not "very good", he's a moron who doesn't make a single good decision in the entire story. His failure is absolutely predictable because he doesn't add any value for anyone else at any point in the story, he doesn't understand his customers, he doesn't understand the market, and he doesn't understand his employees and their motivations. The only thing he ever does is raise money, and he's able to do that because his investors also know nothing about the customers, the market, or the potential employees.
Great business parable! This matches how reality works 100%, including the delusion that guys like this are "really smart".
phikappa 4 days ago [-]
I mean sure, but look, I will not make the same mistakes.
Also my context is totally different. And MY oven concept has none of the drawbacks of their oven and Claude tells me I'm definitely on to something.
I'm off to the notary to sign the docs for Oven.ai (got the domain for only 300k!!)
See ya on my yacht!
user1338 4 days ago [-]
this is the best thing i've read in a while. it's both triggering and prophetic at the same time. really captures the essence of what happens in startups. well done.
WeakSpeller 4 days ago [-]
This was a brilliant read and almost like a playbook in startup world. Reached the end of the story and realised I am the young engineer.
thr0w 4 days ago [-]
> The founder is very good. He builds a plan that, on paper, is flawless and airtight
Premise is laughable right out of the gate.
sherlock-holmes 4 days ago [-]
holy shit this is the best thing i've read in a while.
> The founder offers him 20% of the company and total freedom to build the perfect oven
the slow dilution of the core vision and the engineer's freedom is the saddest thing in this
i'm gonna read it 2 more times at least.
steelebillings 4 days ago [-]
How on earth did this post get so many points and comments lol
matheusmoreira 4 days ago [-]
Now I remember why I noped out of tech a decade ago...
Jeff9James 4 days ago [-]
i am completely new to this stuff (just made a mobile app). thanks for explaining (in 5 year-old kiddo style) how funding and corpo slop works. WOWOW
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virajk_31 4 days ago [-]
No cap
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Galus 4 days ago [-]
A legend in the making.
Chyzwar 5 days ago [-]
This is such European take on startups. Tesla was making shitty overpriced status symbols/value signalling cars and selling FSD for 10k knowing very well that it will not work with car hardware. It took them 10 years to "fake it until you make it stage".
If founder keep iterating and hyping his ovens with enough capital he could become big player in oven maker space and disrupting industry. Learning from this article was that he lacked capital and vision.
contrast 4 days ago [-]
I'd argue the spirit of entrepreneurialism and salesmanship in the story is more American!
I've just been through this process. Very painful. SF based company, US founder.
Same founder story - couldn't focus on customers, couldn't focus on product, always a shiny new idea to distract him from had just been decided or what needed to be decided. Each idea could be the thing that made the difference. Willing to work hard, very capable of talking a good game, not able to deliver.
Tesla had a product that worked, was essentially first and best on the market, not that many models, not that many features. Focusing on the hype and gloss is ignoring a lot of substance. What even is the point of criticising a startup for its hype when its exactly what people want to hear and aligns to a lot of real, significant, ongoing research?
"If the founder had capital and vision" is pretty much tautological. It's true but not particularly useful to know that people who have money and know what to do with it will probably succeed.
Chyzwar 4 days ago [-]
He diluted his vision to garbage on the first enterprise customer. Because he needed to sell now. From OP, there is visible urgency to do sales even when the product is not ready.
Tesla was overhyped in the first decade after acquisition by Musk; it was bleeding money for 15 years. Arguably, the first Tesla cars were worse and pricier than traditional cars.
My point is that compared to the US, in Europe you have very few stories of successful stealth startups or startups that have needed lots of money for many years. That is a main reason why we cannot create a frontier LLM lab.
isoprophlex 4 days ago [-]
weak minds can't comprehend this but indeed, this is the ultimate goal to reach in life: hyping shit up to out-con the conmen into giving you money so you can disrupt things.
just pull harder on the vision bong, and grab some more of that sweet capital bro, or you're not gonna make it
Sheeny96 4 days ago [-]
Yeah bro like why would you just build what you want to your vision? Other people don't want that! Other people know what they want, just build what they want!
Chyzwar 4 days ago [-]
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Henry Ford.
emilsayahi 4 days ago [-]
I know you're getting downvoted but this is painfully true, especially the part about the founder 'choosing which promise to break'. Something I've observed in many Europeans (really just any region with very conservative financing) is that they view venture capital as a system where ideas immediately take off or are doomed to fail. They don't think about how Apple, Amazon, Tesla, etc, took years of trial & error, making tradeoffs, breaking promises, and creating multiple product lines to deliver more and more value. Of course, maybe there's not much disruption to be done in the oven industry (I'd suspect that's actually the case in reality) but Microsoft started off as a flight simulator company; you can just pivot.
You see this in the startup world a lot. Founders with 5+ failed startups in different sectors, because said founder picked the fields mainly by doing some market analysis. Not domain expertise.
There’s then a big mismatch between what the founder thinks is possible, and what the domain expert thinks is possible.
The defense is of course that some people can do that - Musk did it, so why not?
Another defense is that blindingly naïve optimism is sometimes needed to move the needle, as the concept “that can’t be done” simply doesn’t exist to some people.
I’ve sat through some pitches like that, where it is very obvious that the founder/CEO has limited knowledge and expertise in what they’re pitching, where the product is limited, but their enthusiasm is off the charts.
EDIT: The very latest happened only a couple of weeks ago. A startup had reached out to my employer as they’re developing a platform in our domain. Higher ups liked what they’d seen, enough to arrange a real meeting.
Startup is only 3 months old, and the moment I opened the platform I recognized a vibecoded (likely using clause) platform identical to almost all other launched on a daily basis.
So I probed a bit about data sources, serious questions regarding security, etc. but the guy was pretty fluent in consultant (turns out he had worked as a management consultant before launching), and the CTO was just nodding along.
In the end they wanted our data, and promised the moon on features - but as mentioned, I’m sure the whole product was entirely vibecoded.
Or, if they're an engineer, to design cool products while not having the faintest idea of how to run a business and manage people. Ran into far more of those than get-rich-quick types.
Having said that, I was also lucky enough to work for a company where the founder had a science degree but not in the field he was currently working in, was really good at sales, and recognised that others knew a lot more about the field than he did and was willing to listen to them. One of the lead tech guys could literally say to him "this is a stupid idea" and the idea would get changed. They muddled along for some years until he found the right people to run things, and have been doing pretty well ever since. Last I checked it was still a good place to work for.
I know a company that fits this so well that I almost want to check the names. It's older than 3 months though.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe
Thanks, gave me a chuckle. One to remember.
You mean the moment when someone says "It's Facebook but for dogs! That should be easy, right? I had the idea, that's the hard bit, you just need to write it!"
And for all the talk of investing into people, what was your opinion?
The Buran, a soviet spaceplane very similar to the space shuttle, landed autonomously
Lets throw in a few more of Elon's failures, this time lets focus on the ones that are outright dangerous or killing people!
- In an accident, the Cybertruck has frequently trapped people inside the vehicle and caused them to burn to death when the batteries catch fire because they hid the manual release on the doors for aesthetic reasons, so people couldn't get out. Also the unbreakable glass means that people spent their final moments desperately trying to smash an unbreakable window while burning to death. People have died from this! It was totally predictable and preventable! https://www.ktvu.com/news/parents-woman-killed-cybertruck-cr...
- Fully self driving. Hasn't happened, and a lot of the danger is because he wanted to cheap out on lidar and brashly overpromised on its capabilities.
Lets also focus on some of the funny ones that came from his need for validation, like needing people to think he's a great gamer: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2025/jan/20/elon-musk-stan... (why would any adult not involved in E-Sports even want to convince their peers they're great at gaming? Like, who cares?!)
Even when he has a good idea like Starlink he ruins it by awful about it (shutting it off for entities he disagrees with).
This guy should not be anyone's hero.
One can dislike various aspects of a person without it being politically motivated.
He made all the money first the silicon valley way (paypal) and then decided to actually make and sell non-software/ip things that physically exist. I think that is actually hard. And if successful very valuable.
Although making software isn't easy, I think there are lots of silicon valley types who create IP, but enter a super-competitive market. IP can be valuable, but it might be quick and easy to spool up a competitor and/or copy it.
If you think that Musk did his endeavors in order to become rich, you are likely mistaken.
That was the most "the emperor wears no clothes"-moment I've ever witnessed in my life. I play more PoE than I care to admit, and it was obvious within mere seconds that he has absolutely no clue what's going on.
It was absolutely surreal to watch.
It is also so bizarre to brag about rankings for games where the grind to end game is a massive time sink. It wasnt like he was some LoL god where there is no grind only skill.
> His character, at the impressive level of 95, reflected not only a significant time investment but also a high degree of expertise.
> Musk’s performance has sparked skepticism about whether he genuinely leveled and equipped his character himself.
> The prevailing sentiment in the gaming community is that Musk doesn’t typically invest much time in video games, but instead leverages gaming achievements to draw media attention.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Elon-Musk-embarrasses-himself-...
IMO people who are seeking approval tend to not go out of their way to be assholes quite so often ("pedo guy" incident, for example).
Yea, that’s called narcissism. Their only drive in life is to be admired, and it’s much easier to lie and deceive to reach that goal, than doing something that’s truly praiseworthy
He's an action junkie.
In both cases he saw inefficiencies and just wanted to spend the energy he's always been overflowing with to improve things. I don't know about Musk but my friend hates mediocrity and saw everything as something he can improve.
In another case I was in car, for a long trip, with someone else (who was working to become an... Ambassador: hardly the tech type!) and that person would constantly comment on what could be done enhanced.
Something something about personality types, the builders, etc.
Those who only ever want to spend the money of --and benefit from the wealth created by-- others are going to dismiss it all as "people who are after money" but it's more complicated than that and you can't generalize people.
I know several doctors for example: two of them are clearly money-driven (one of them literally told me "I'd never ever teach medicine, I'm in this only for the money") but most of the others I know are just happy to help people be more healthy.
I've got another friend, not rich at all, he's working an additional job as a firefighter: sure it brings some money, but that's not the reason. He's also an action junkie. He was there driving ambulances during Covid: to be helpful, for the action, etc.
It's not all about money. Thinking it's only about money is a mindset that often comes from those who want the money of others (through taxes).
Thanks for your agenda, was really looking forward to it.
Thanks for sharing, it’s nice to be reminded of potential other motivations of people who outwardly seem to just want to accumulate money.
A less charitable response would be the desire for attention and approval to fill some kind of deeply rooted inferiority complext.
The latter view would also illustrate a similarity to Trump.
End of the day though, why does it matter his true motivation? If I was working at one of his companies, as long as the paycheck cashes and the stock options are legally mine, if his motivation is money-based or attention-based or he's a true believer, I'm getting money and I can feed my kids.
It's not like I'm going to get the chance to talk with him personally and get to know him and sus out what it is, either, so it's all just pointless theorizing. What we, the general public "know" is a result of various people with their own agenda pushing their owna viewpoints? Does the man know anything at all, is he a total charlatan, or is he smart and gets it? Hit refresh on a different subreddit and get a different answer.
Are you asking why the motivations of one of the richest (and thus most influential) people on the planet matter? He’s actively influencing domestic and foreign elections to further his own goals. He gutted government aid programs, leading to millions of deaths. He shares propaganda to a massive audience. Of course his motivations matter.
> If I was working at one of his companies, as long as the paycheck cashes and the stock options are legally mine, if his motivation is money-based or attention-based or he's a true believer, I'm getting money and I can feed my kids.
Yeah, until the world he creates is one where you can’t. The reason the world is in its current fucked-up state is that too many people think like that. Until the leopard eats their face and they’re surprised, but by then it’s too late.
The thing is, he _had_ this. He had all of Reddit worshipping him. He had the press. He had the tech-internet.
Then he knowingly blew it all up overnight to ally with Trump.
I think the reasons why are pretty clear: a son-who-loves-me became a daughter-who-despises-me and his companies got repeatedly hamstrung by California Democrats.
But if his root motivation was truly just approval, he would have taken it on the chin and accepted slower growth of his other ambitions. So it's a little more complicated than that.
He blew it up years before that with his "pedo guy" false accusation drama.
This is speculation, but I am guessing that he didn't do this knowingly. He's probably surrounded with yes-men who didn't challenge his fever dream of swooping in, fixing the government, and being lauded as a hero.
It's true. Nothing the American left hates more than an ex-Democrat. If only they hadn't made being a centrist a Republican position.
Except… they don’t.
You need a different type of camera - one not optimized for “vision” (in the sense of “object discernment”) - one Teslas do not have.
And even if they did, to count photons you need an enclosed space in front of your lens, not the … open road.
Which is annoying: Teslas haven’t had that, and could never have that but he goes on an investor call and openly lies about it, and doesn’t get called out. It’s not even an “aspirational statement” it’s a lie that goes against the laws of physics.
He knows a lot, and he also knows enough to be able to be confidently wrong and pass the bullshit meter of people who don’t know any better. They are not the same thing.
Nope. Musk has been obsessed with rockets and electric cars, specifically, for a very long time
Fix it by separating the tools (different non-interconnected VMs, etc for dev/qa/preprod/prod environments) and the permissions (different accounts, sessions, tokens, etc for the run/debug/test/deploy loops).
I am quite certain these exist already large kitchens and I seem to remember one from a school diner from maybe 35 years ago, but I've always been wondering why they don't exist on smaller scale.
Restaurants cycle dishes a lot during a single mealtime. Homes don’t. I don’t think “I can’t wait 2 hours” is typically a real problem.
The hot water is recirculated during the wash, the rinse uses fresh water from the tap with the excess going out an overflow. A little sump water gets replaced every cycle, but enough stays that it's back up to temperature before you've emptied and refilled it. There's also a small peristaltic pump to top up the detergent directly from the bottle.
Not much benefit in a home setting unless you fancy having it hot and ready 24/7 though.
This is probably the one trick consumer dishwashers should emulate
the task is prepare food, eat, clean. when you leave the kitchen and come back the next day the task is now different, its unpack, prepare,eat,clean.
you are constantly not finishing today's tasks. it lives to see another day. if you can fix it, bound it to the workflow, you will be a billionaire
You could use your same type of reasoning for food/cooking. When you buy food and put it in the fridge to cook later, you haven't finished the task. I think that's more a way of feeling permanently uncomfortable with things not being finished. There is no end state for most things in the house. Work is never done.
dual dishwashers
Because they need space, they need even more nasty chemicals than domestic dishwashers, they need a stack of trays to load the dishes on and a crew to load and unload them.
If you want a dishwasher which doesn't require unloading after use you can get 2 of them, one of which is "clean", the other "dirty" or washing. When the "dirty" one is full you turn it on and let it wash while you take whatever you need from the "clean" one. Once the formerly-dirty one has finished it's cycle the roles are reversed and it becomes the "clean" one.
I've used these while working as a volunteer in a camp kitchen during work weekends, where we had maybe 20-40 guests eating a meal. You put dishes/silverware/pots/pans/whatever in a square tray, push it into one side of the Hobart, and pull down a lever to close the doors and start the cycle. They take a number of minutes that you can count on one hand... I seem to remember 90-120 seconds but I'm not sure. Stuff comes out clean and hot on the other side, and you want to pipeline this so it's one person with dirty hands feeding stuff in, and one person with clean hands (and thick gloves) pulling the square trays out, letting them cool, and putting the clean dishes/etc. away.
They release a huge amount of steam and they're wonderful for this kind of volume (20-40 people at a meal + all the cooking implements to support this). Larger than home use, though --- unless of course you had a mansion with servants. And I get the sense that maintenance and operating costs would be a lot higher than a regular plain dishwasher.
On one shift I was paired with a ex-convict. With the exception of the cooks themselves, most of the kitchen was staffed with high school students and ex-cons. The ex-con I was paired with was a dead ringer for Roger Daltry. I was on the "dirty" side and he was on the "hot" side (because there is a pecking order in even the worst jobs), and for some reason, he wanted _me_ to control the opening of the door. I think the reason is that this guy was high all the time and would space out unless something grabbed his attention. Anyway, I made the mistake of opening the door a bit too soon, when the machine was running, and it blasted this guy with steam. I remember him yelping in pain and then glaring at me angrily. One of the line cooks said something along the lines of "we try not to kill our dishwashers" which probably stopped the guy from punching me.
It's a beast of a machine. A little out of place in an ordinary household kitchen...
The downside of low tech solutions if many people touch it (i.e. not just the janitor or rostered staff) is that someone can still add their shared mug to the dishwasher just after a cycle's complete, causing the entire batch to be considered unclean. Or in your example, someone deciding to flip the sign but not emptying out the dishwasher.
Then again, these are little things that people have learnt to make do and just live with, and I'm not sure it's worth paying 2x or 3x, or even 20x the price just for fancy feet, like what the article thinks people might do with a fancy oven.
That doesn't help, however, if users are lazy and don't unload the dishwasher after opening it to grab a clean plate or whatever.
It's a nice feature that can be added with existing sensors and one line of logic in the uC. Another one I noticed recently is garage door openers with the photo transmitter/receiver ('beam') to stop the door if someone blocks it can use that same beam to turn on the light if broken when the door is up. Handy if entering a dark garage from outside.
(They also have a fridge and then two pull out drawer units, one is for keeping extra snacks frozen things (like ice, ice cream, juice etc.) and the other is for veggie / meat.)
With 2 dishwashers one would use some clean plates and maybe leave some pots behind that would not be used for a while. In practice, these would need to be emptied. It is a great idea if one uses only one dishwasher worth of utensils though.
I think of those toilet modules in japan where you can clean the whole bathroom with a hose. Maybe what we need are self cleaning cupboards.
The cycle-to-volume ratio is as bad as it could possibly be. Conventional dishwashers recirculate water as they wash and rinse. I imagine there's an mx + c formula to how much water is needed (c = enough water to prime the pump or whatever). So compared to a normal size load, you'd be wasting that constant amount of water.
The wash is also likely going to follow mx+c (c = time for grease to break down, time to rinse, time to dry etc). You can wait a few hours for a whole set of crockery. Can you wait a few hours for a single plate?
Commercial "passthrough" dishwashers work very differently. Manual mechanical action with a spray, plus a quick wash, sterilise and rinse. At that point why not wash your single plate by hand?
One pot, no dishes. Each roommate has to keep track of their private spoon. Greedy "clever" roommate who shows up with a liter ladle triggers a spoon fight in the kitchen. Eating from pot by hand is corrected by rapping their knuckles with your spoons. Eventually, all the glassware ends up broken, and some bozo threw out all the used red solo cups, but luckily, the kitchen faucet has a spray attachment.
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman's Odyssey
And the 'less water' claim is technically correct, but it doesn't mention the decamethylcyclopentasiloxane. Just because it's complicated to spell, you understand.
Sodium bicarbonate residue won't kill our customers, so consider it technically edible. The issue of taste and efficiency will be approached after MVP
(No, from dry-cleaning)
https://stroodles.co.uk/collections
I bought some edible cups out of curiosity a few years back. Nice for coffee. I did end up eating them all, although some of them were still dry at the time of consumption.
I think edible soap has better behaviour-adjusted shelf-life here.
This allows the pre-wash cycle to get rid of most of the grease and stuff before the main cycle so the main cycle is more effective and the water is cleaner so the final rinse works better too.
(I heard the rumour too. But no-one I know fails to rinse the "washing up liquid" (as we call it) off their plates)
I’d like to speak with you, if so.
I’ve seen laundry setups where the water is ozonated, and no detergent (or hot water!) is required to remove debris and oxidize oils and other gunk out of clothes.
I absolutely hate bending over to unload the dishwasher. When I open a dishwasher, it should slide out and lift itself to cabinet height. And it should just hold an entire bottle of detergent so I don't have to put it in each time.
The two dishwashers idea is neat, but the cupboard capacity is greater than that of a second dishwasher; and we haven’t got the space!
I achieve the first two goals by simply scrubbing+rinsing dishes after most uses and letting them dry. No glued-on food to go gnarly. They go thru the dishwasher once in a while. It's my personal strategy for being eco without getting food poisoning, but I've never seen a paper that evaluates this method in comparison to more-typical workflows (i.e. in-sink wash-using-soap or in-dishwasher wash-using-soap).
I think it’s the disconnect. Each persona is an expert in their own field but is completely oblivious to other critical areas.
The founder knows how to raise money but doesn’t really understand the customers. The engineer knows the tech but doesn’t really understand what it takes to keep the business afloat. The salesperson knows what customers want but doesn’t really understand what’s possible to make. The investor knows the numbers but doesn’t really understand how poorly the business is run.
I suspect if you look at successful startups you’ll often see a very small (1-3) group of founders who are very close, each can do more than one thing really well, and their combined expertise means that together they have very few blindspots.
"The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.
Why do so many founders build things no one wants? Because they begin by trying to think of startup ideas. That m.o. is doubly dangerous: it doesn't merely yield few good ideas; it yields bad ideas that sound plausible enough to fool you into working on them."
Finding a problem _you have yourself_ also increases the chance that you understand the problem space.
"their kitchens are custom-built, so they need ovens with specific dimensions. Oh, and a rotating base like the one they already have."
“My oven at home connects to the fireplace. Does yours?”
“I make a lot of wedding cakes, what have you got for me?”
“Do you have a Ramadan mode?”
Those are all problems.
But are they problems worth spending time? I dunno.
They're not problems people need solved. They're problems people think they want solved. need != want.
the high street bakers needed reliability with improved efficiency at an affordable price (cost of risk). they didn't need improved efficiency, less reliability and still really expensive.
It seems like most customers are returning the oven, which would normally be an extremely strong signal that there is a quality problem. In the SaaS world, the equivalent would be churn, but it's not always as straightforward since if users quit before they sign up (e.g. by reading a review or using a free trial), then they don't show up in that metric.
The "secret" is just to talk to people in the field they're trying to "revolutionize," and ideally observe them work. Often, people become blind to workflow problems and workarounds become normal process. They never even consider to look for a better way to do something. Those are the opportunities for founders to solve.
But what I've seen a lot is founders just arbitrarily coming up with an idea that sounds cool on paper, raising money, and only realizing too late that there is zero actual market fit.
Occasionally the business types come along and make it worse by turning it into a product or a service. Other times they make bad products and bad services from scratch.
The people in this story are focusing at the wrong layer (as are many of us). They need to stop trying to sell ovens and start trying to sell baked goods. Maybe once they're good at that, they can also sell whatever oven they came up with along the way.
If most founders are wealthy, or even reasonably comfortable, it's possible they're too out of touch to identify a problem shared by enough people.
The handshake comes first. The requirements come later.
This is assuming there IS a way to keep the business afloat. It's this framing of thinking that has caused more suffering, frustration, and bad will in all the places I've worked at which are just reskins of this article.
A business is entitled to it's model but it is not entitled to success. This story which is more than just a strawman or anecdote gets it right: The engineers are doing their job the best they can with unreasonable expectations set by people who do not feel they need to be constrained by reality and just have dollar signs in their eyes. The engineers do not share the same type of blame as everyone else at the company. Their failure was enabling nonsense and greed.
In a couple of these cases, the company was ultimately sold in a fire sale. The early investors, founders, and employees got nothing. The acquisition is still celebrated as a "success", of course.
No, and neither does anyone else in these scenarios. Almost all startups are trying to build something new that they want people to want. But customers almost universally do not want your product. They don't give a crap about you or your product. What they care about is delivering their own product and/or achieving their own goals. Your product is a tool. If it is a tool that helps them for a reasonable price, they will buy it. But never be fooled into thinking "They want my product". They don't. They want an effective tool to to meeting their own needs. Your product wins when it is that tool.
the trick to sales is to feed into that selfishness.
With Elon, I think one of his is “build it as cheaply as possible, and then you can afford to only sell to people who are purely excited about the tech.” I don’t know when he learned this (I actually wonder if it was a lesson he learned from Eberhard/Tarpenning at Tesla, who were only selling the roadster to sports car enthusiasts who cared more about 0-60 than fit & finish, or range, or cost, or anything else).
Anyway, my current interpretation is that the pizza guys shouldn’t have sold to pepepizza (or friends and family, probably). I know startups do this all the time, but whenever I’ve seen it, it always seems to turn into a distraction from the Big Idea that is the company’s thesis. Then Big Customer gets hung up on ancillary requirements and Cool Startup doesn’t really get to test their thesis at all. Maybe the key is to stay small, focus on finding people who really care about the new oven tech, and size the company to that market until you’ve solved enough problems to expand to people for whom the cool tech is concern #2 or #3.
This entirely. I've been CTO at a handful of startups, most recently one that sold for a very large sum of money — and the successful ones are almost always led by people who keep things dirt simple: focus on the customer, execute quickly, communicate clearly, keep costs low, and keep the technology simple. That's basically it. Just a few simple things, applied relentlessly.
The ones that failed were always the total opposite — not listening to their customers, poor communication across the org, blowing their runway on "we need Google-scale infrastructure," switching languages or frameworks halfway through the project, and so on.
I agree that being a "custom engineering contractor for BigCustomer" might not have been the ideal outcome, but at least the entire company would have gotten some expertise, and probably be able to pivot and finally build their own thing given more resources (*cough*moreVCfunding*cough*).
I mostly see the leaders or the product people telling the engineers or designers that they don't understand business—implying that the latter aren't reasonable people who can advocate for things that balance the various dynamics that have been brought up in a meeting, that their view results from only considering the thing technically or aesthetically. It's a hand-wavey maneuver that's always there, said without specifics. This is particularly so given you've provided specs and designs and they rarely show business or market analysis. I've worked with many PMs to propose our work to stakeholders—they swear to the audience they've done the business work, but in preparing the presentation, they just googled a couple very broad things (one example, "the collaboration market is a $70B market"). I've worked with others, who I've tried to learn from, to show or point me to some basics of that analysis and they didn't know.
Product managers and product people in general have very little background in product management. It's not a degree or anything. Sometimes they come from backgrounds that are helpful, but we oddly have junior and entry level ones. This doesn't make that much sense, given they are formal or informal leaders of teams. What could they be bringing to the table? A (sad) exception is when access to meetings or information is gatekept, so then they're bringing that. Sometimes it's argued that PMs are good at seeing across things, but that has not been my experience. The problem with the each person is an expert in their own field is that in a lot of teams, the expert is frequently not better at their thing. The decision maker is not actually better at business or seeing across things or making decisions.
Most people can’t just stop working and start working for no cash.
I might be missing some obvious sarcasm, though!
Software in general is a field quite compatible with initial self-funding, in ways you can't say for other industries.
But even still, investors threw away gobs of money on clearly unsustainable businesses like NFTs, and capitalism in general is happy to sell people the rope they will use to hang capitalists, so it's not even impossible to find investors if you absolutely need them.
Pair the lack of ongoing payments to investors or lenders with the superior execution of worker-led organizations, and companies such as these should pretty clearly mop up their competitors saddled with non-value-added executive management and non-value-added investors.
That is, assuming these roles don't provide any value to companies.
That’s only close to possible if we start with the assumption that all businesses are billion dollar businesses.
This is also unrelated with the possibility to bootstrap a business without money.
How do people actually buy ovens? What actually matters for customers, not what do they say matters? Who are the competitors and why do you think you can actually do better than them in at least some niche? What culture actually works for an oven producing company?
> ... if he sells a new oven to the country’s pizza makers, pastry chefs, and bakers, he only needs to capture 10% of the market to become a billionaire.
i.e. the founder assumes that "ovens" is a single $10b-sized market, and it isn't, because reality has a surprising amount of detail (as sibling comment also notes).
You could interpret this whole story as a saga of very inefficient oven market(s) research, the end result of which is the forum post at the end:
> On the forum an old user warns “Make sure that you support rotating bases day 1”.
its because the story just makes that assumption.
What I would love is to read more of the story from the perspective of the salesperson (we're all too sympathetic to the engineers, and potentially ceo - but I suspect their part of the story goes beyond "I'll just say yes to everything and cash my variable share of the deal". Otherwise, pour rational next move would be to all become salesperson and build oven on the side for fun.)
Also, I would love to read the perspective from the customer side ? ("What do you mean they sell oven that don't rotate ? We clearly specified that we needed an ISO-98765 compliant oven !!! OF COURSE it has to rotate !! why did the boss just went with the cheapest supplier again ?")
Or even the perspective from BigOven ("guys ! I read on linked in that this little startup has built a candle button, why don't we have that already ?")
More seriously - do you know of startups that got away with salespersons saying "no, sorry, we can't make rotating ovens, you should see our competition, or come back in three years." Aren't those dead as dodos, by virtue of not having any customer to pay the bill ?
My bosses don't buy the ovens that are the most dependable, the most efficient, nor ones that are even compatible with the other steps in the cooking process.
They're impressed by the AI oven that cooks the pizza mostly right 30-40% of the time. "It'll be more consistent if you let the oven decide how long to cook." But we ignore that because of how stupid it is.
They buy ovens that suck because sales people impress them with baking jargon they don't understand. At least, that's how it comes off when they talk about it. I'm sure getting a good deal is a much bigger factor than they say.
They don't eat pizza. They can't even tell whether it's burnt. They tell me "soon the oven will do everything for us and you won't be needed."
They don't seem to comprehend that an oven can't knead dough or mix ingrdients. And that's even ignoring the fact that the auto-cook features are wrong except in the best of conditions.
The ovens break constantly because of the humidity levels needed to keep the dough nice. They spend more on repairs than they ever did on the ovens. We keep telling them to get the moisture-resistant ovens. They say it's too expensive.
In this story specifically they needed to bring technical stakeholders to Mallorca.
Not if they're building inverting ovens for another big corporation. If you do one truly worthwhile thing better than everyone else, do you still need to chase after marginal opportunities to stay afloat? I'm sure there are many, many small companies (not "startups") who are just quietly filling a niche.
I (maybe idealistically) believe that when you give the people building agency and connect them with the end-user, you get better outcomes.
- previous customer yells at you for not delivering required features. You ask the engineer about the status of that feature
- engineers write a manifesto on #general complaining about you for asking them about the status of the new feature
- PM calls you in to yell at you for trying to jump the roadmap
- you start prepping for weekly call with the CEO. at least doubled your numbers this quarter!
- while you're prepping you get a response to one of your cold emails from the day prior, someone calling you "gauche" and "annoying"
- go into CEO meeting. CEO yells at you for being 80% under the quota, because the psychotic quota was set to 10x last year's numbers.
- long day! go home. husband yells at you for working late
etc.
That being said, engineers usually don't complain about being asked for the status of the feature.
What we complain about is being asked why the feature we never committed to deliver is still not there yet.
Even worse if we get cornered into uttering words that are then ret-conned into a commitment.
(A very "efficient" techniques I've heard of if for salesperson to "ask the same question over and over again with enough variations until the engineer and PMs cave." May be helpful if you have already decided to answer "yes" to the feature request / RFP checkbox anyway. Doesn't end well for most people, but sometime a quota gotta be quota-ed....)
> The founder offers [the engineer] 20% of the company and total freedom to build the perfect oven. The salary isn’t great, but there’s the promise: [...] And something more important than money: he’ll finally get to build the oven of his dreams.
That turned out to be a complete lie. Not necessarily a deliberate one - I think it's quite possible both the engineer and the founder were initially believing it - but it was still a situation that never existed in that way.
Essentially, they weren't aware of all the constraints that existed for their oven design and then mistook a situation where the constraints were unknown with one where there were no constraints at all and they could just build whatever they wanted. But the real constraints were set by the market, investors and corporate customers and those were already there before they even stated the company.
(I don't think it means you have to submit to those slavishly and can never bring anything of your actual vision into your products, but it feels naive to be completely unaware of them.)
Netflix, Google, Airbnb, Uber, Slack, the iPhone, Github, Stripe, Dropbox. Big players at the time could have built their products, but didn't.
I'm not fundamentally disagreeing with you -- but I think there are some things where "everybody has clearly been doing this wrong the whole time" doesn't pass the smell test: ovens have been around for millennia, including through the whole industrial revolution and recent exponential modernization of technology.
Doesn't this still line up with the original point though?
The incumbents had the exact same opportunity to capitalize. Blockbuster could've leaned into streaming hard before Netflix.
I do think that's become a bit harder recently, though, so the original point is slightly less relevant (though obviously still exists, see for example OpenAI vis-a-vis DeepMind). Big companies are much faster on chasing trends, even if they end up amounting to not much. See crypto, for example. I do think part of that reason is because the current wave of companies capitalized where incumbents faltered, so they're desperate not to make the same mistake.
However, I think Anova would be a better direct counterpoint. They started in sous vide, replacing existing products that did the same thing but better. But now they are literally trying to replace ovens. That effort started after the Electrolux acquisition in 2017, but they do seem to be pretty successful. A friend of mine really likes their steam oven, and if I had more space in the kitchen, I would be tempted.
Philips is in no way strapped of engineering talent, but they can still design the occasional bad product, when there are many alternatives at similar price points that are better, like the Sage Barista Express.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcoDb_4s4y8
Even though our ovens actually work fine, the problem is a new competitor: OpenOven. Their oven is completely free, and on the Italian forum everyone talks about them. It has even way more buttons than ours (most don't work very well, but the community loves it).
We almost sold to MrBaguette, one of the biggest bakery chains in the world, as they wanted new oven supplier for their next generation of kitchen. Their chef tried our oven and loved it. But in the end they went with the pricier one from Corporate Oven, because some VP thought we were too small and worried we wouldn't supply them in 20 years.
If I may ask how do you actually plan to make money? Because as far as I can tell, you're still losing a lot of money on every oven you give away.
> Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.
(I'm not a mod or anything; I just noticed that most of your comments have been flagged/killed, and I suspect this might be why.)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
If there are specific tells that the text has been AI generated, point them out! A lazy drive by of "that's AI!" doesn't teach anything.
FWIW I do find it somewhat useful to have someone point out "this is an LLM" - I don't always have my AI detector on and I appreciate it when other people do. And when someone says particular text was LLM generated I need to go back and think about whether I believe it a bit harder.
There was so much truth in this on a Dilbertesque level. If you can learn from this you are winning.
I am not saying "VC bad". I am saying it is a sharp-edged tool which you need to wield with great care. This humorous piece really points out the pitfalls.
Worth the read - do not just lurk here in the comment section (as I usually do!)
Good fiction teaches you something you hadn't seen before, or challenges your perspective, or articulates a point of view or personality that you had never before considered. If it's just "some guy went to work and it sucked and he was right and everyone else was wrong and the Green People did classic Green People bullshit", and there's nothing else complicated or humanizing it, and no real-world lesson or stranger-than-fiction details to it, then what value does it have?
Like, what would happen if you asked a redditor with 10 years of experience reading about startups, but no real exposure to that culture/experience beyond the comment section, to write a story summarizing the consensus opinion on reddit of how startups typically work? Of course, because it's made up it's not wrong, but it exists entirely within the socially-contingent reality of the Internet Consensus.
In the real world there's politics, inter-personal relationships, personalities and personality flaws, and too much detail for "startup flails around" to be something you can reduce to "the startup flailed around". Of course it did, but why and how? A story that says "you know how it goes in all the other stories? yeah, that" or "there was a guy like you and he was good, and all the other guys were idiots and they were bad" has no point
I found this piece to contain more layers of detail than the usual feel-good dunk-on-bean-counters rants.
You are 100% correct on good fiction.
I have the feeling that you will not like Franz Kafka.
Without elevating this piece to that level I think we can still agree to disagree on what good fiction is.
Or maybe your humor is better aligned with the socially-contingent reality of Franz.
But your perspective is valued. I need to shake of my bias and remember that there are no easy wins. For each point there is a counter. And I find it hard to argue against yours as my bias makes your stance feel very dismissive. Everything then turns into wedge issues.
I would have preferred an argument based on why the piece was flawed not how. Then I could counter with my experience and we could have had a conversation.
Enough Internet for me today! ;-)
You should never take a risk, business people are all evil and stupid, you should treat every employment or business opportunity as purely transactional because they'll do the same to you, there's nothing you can do about your job or employment, the only way to win is to cheat because everyone else is doing it, the key to happiness is educating other there's not really any cause and effect involved in the way things work unless you, personally, already know it. Just, you shouldn't do anything unless you understand everything about it, and if you don't it's not your fault.
> not flailing around is very difficult and unlikely
This is literally the defining trait of startups. What makes it stupid is that it's always more complicated than "engineer guy did everything he could but got screwed in the end" and that in real life, sometimes people do actually make money or establish businesses because of decisions they made, and conversely that there are real causes and effects behind things that don't go the way you want them to. Telling a story that doesn't contradict in anyway with consensus (so, directionally correct but always wrong) opinion has no point in the same way that there is no point telling a story where a knight rescues a princess by journeying through the kingdom making friends and overcoming challenges, then confronts the evil guy and kills him, the end. This is just that, but "the shady business guy and the screwed engineers"
- Mario
It really surprised me how it seems to have polarized people. I never seem to learn.
I’ve seen the same thing everywhere I go. I don’t have the disposition to be in sales, but I periodically daydream of making huge commissions by straight up bullshitting people. There seems to be no downside.
I think there’s a balance to it. You have to meet the customer, and also understand your boundaries. I’ve sold non-existent features that I was unsure if I could deliver, but always solved it since I’m good at smooth talking. I’ll make sure what I deliver brings value, and keep a dialogue with the client. Sales relations are rarely static from my experience.
If you don’t see the value of your own word, I can’t give it back to you.
The founder gets angry. He promised the VCs 10% of Spain’s oven market. The entire market. “We can’t sacrifice any of them.”
It’s not just greed. The 5 million was raised with the entire market on the slide. The founder isn’t choosing between right and wrong: he’s choosing which promise to break.
I wonder what the author had in mind when he wrote "which promise to break". Is the founder thinking about his promises to the VCs? Or thinking between the VC and customers?
I think this is the most human moment of the entire story. Everything else is pretty standard tropes (and just like everyone in this chain, these tropes ring very very true). They're almost systemic issues.
But this is a moment where the one person who is supposed to actually have agency (the founder!) actually has a choice. I don't want to nitpick the technicalities of the choice (it seems pretty straightforward to me that getting to 10% of total market would more than justify multiple product lines), but the psychology here.
Why is the founder uncomfortable breaking promises to investors, but more comfortable selling a garbage product? Is he just hopeful?
The investors gave him $5 million. Large commitment, large risk.
Each customer gives him 15k per unit. Even a rare large customer who buys 100 ovens gives him 150k. Small commitment, small risk.
If he breaks his promise to the investors, he can't raise more money easily. It will be very hard to find another $5 million.
If he breaks his promise to the customers with a garbage product, he can more easily find a replacement customer for the much smaller risk.
If a founder is able to spin and control both the loss of a major potential customer, and the low customer satisfaction rate (weak follow up from pilots) to the investors, I simply cannot imagine that doing 2 product lines is that much of a big deal.
More personally, I'd feel that if it truly were a coldly rational decision, the founder would feel confident in defending his choices (at least against any initial suggestions to the contrary) without resorting to anger.
> The founder has it all figured out: the problem was never the plan. The problem was the execution
"Execution" being one of those magic business words, I've said this exact thing but only once lampooned thusly did it dawn on me how psychotic it is. If VC-funded startups are almost by definition about "a big vision", then the vision is never wrong -- a self-consuming logic answered by the magic of Execution.
Interestingly, what is ignored there is the founder is also the CEO here, so if the execution was bad ... shouldn't he be fired?
This detail, among several others, is subtle but deeply fateful.
That hurts and exemplifies everything I hate about the industry. Humans lost on a Kanban board, abstracted away and covered in business speak.
The most resonant line for me. This line for me is about how good project management meets team culture. You want a high performant team: one that remains focused and motivated - but the goals are carrots, not sticks.
Restaurants wouldn't even need dish washers if they switched to paper plates. The pots and pans have to be washed by hand anyway. I was a dishwasher in a restaurant when I was only 14. I'd work a 12-hour shift on Saturdays because none of the 'real' dishwashers were available. The only perk I got was that I could have an occasional pipsi on-th-house. I also worked as a young adault in my father's restaurant. I'd come home from 'my' job every day, working on an electronics production line only to be shown the huge pile of dishes that had accumulated during the day. The production line paid me $2.50 per hour. My dad didn't pay me anything. But he let me park my 20-foot trailer in his back yard, which was adjacent to the restaurant property, and in the winter I had to refill my propane every 3 days.
> First, a definition: the minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort or in other words building the most minimum version of their product that will still allow them to learn. [1]
There is no hypothesis to be validated or learning connected to those prototypes in the story, and I think using the definition by Eric Ries would change the story quite a bit.
[1]: https://leanstartup.co/resources/articles/what-is-an-mvp/
What I think is a bit of a missed opportunity is for the product to fail with "the pizza|cake|pastry is half-baked" and so customers still have to do the rest of the job anyway.
A wiser version of myself would have cut my losses after at most one year, or much sooner, especially after noticing the red flags. This is something I'm keeping in mind for my next gig.
i was definitely the another Engineer in my story.
your article needs to be passed to engineers & I guess everyone before graduating college.
in all the satire - what our industry forgot is - how did people build/fund companies before Venture Capital ?
I’ve found that most people hate making tradeoffs. They don’t recognize that the things they do like don’t do everything.
So If you focus too much on a customer or worse an internal stakeholder who hasn’t designed or built things, it can became a Homer Simpson designing a car situation.
The story could be change with just a few sentences in the middle that would turn it into the founding myth of how Globoven took 100% of the market for energy efficient portable emergency ovens for NATO military use.
If the founder had started by talking with people in the problem space, he could have discovered what problems were actually worth solving before investing any money and effort into a product.
Everything after that happened were downstream effects of creating something without a defensible reason why and for whom.
So I can't see the reason for the sarcasm. Different things.
The baker is happy and proud with what she could contribute to the worldwide bakers community and has made enough money that she and her family never need to worry again. There is just one problem: By now, she is getting old and none of her kids are interested in bakery or oven tech. She's also getting a steadily growing amount of offers to sell the rights to the brand.
Eventually, she caves and sells the brand and designs to BigOven. They promote her brand front and center and initially also use her design. But over time, BigOven replaces more and more parts with cheaper equivalents while keeping the overall look the same - until eventually, they replace the entire product with a stock design.
The bakers take a while to catch on (during which time BigOven makes a ton of additional money from the brand value) but eventually, the quality decline becomes impossible to ignore. Frustrated posts about corporate greed and enshittification make the rounds on the Italian forums.
"They don't make em like they used to" someone writes...
There's no way a contemporary tech founder would offer 5% of the company to an engineer that late in the game. It would be 0.5%, and it would be ISOs at worthless pricing.
Also, for all the founder's Leadership contribution that warranted owning more than half the company, apparently they didn't know that those VCs could pressure/pay all their other companies to buy ovens. And then you simply ride that growth signal to a successful exit. Building and sustaining a viable business is a problem for seasoned professional managers, not brilliant innovators.
In keeping with the metaphor, how could Engineer, Mario, or Luigi have negotiated better trade offs? I mean, working for a baker as the founder or at least on the board is huge. But what else?
Someone who’s had success critique my draft here:: I want to respect expertise without “caving”.
“I understand the goal of the organization is 10% of the oven market, and I believe in that goal, but if we focus only on pizza for a while, we hit 6%, and gain at least 25% NPS. The garlic bread, calzone, and sweet pastry markets would be easy to tackle, getting us closer to cake. Alternatively, we start with cake. If we deliver Pepepizza a cake solution that absolutely thrills them, would that buy us credibility and time?”
Why did the engineer "who spends all day talking and arguing about ovens" not realize this sooner? Sure, "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it", but the engineer's salary wasn't great anyway; the real goal was to build "the oven of his dreams". To do that, he very much needed to understand the algorithmic complexity involved.
What I assume happened is the engineer wasn't sure whether the idea could work, and the only way to find out was to try. Well, he tried, and he found out. Oh well.
Isn't this how VC is supposed to work? Ten startups try ten ambitious ideas. Nine fail, one succeeds. The one that succeeds does well enough to make up for the nine failures. And so it goes. There was nothing wrong with the nine founders who failed. They were just unlucky, and they can try again.
I think what went wrong in the story is very simple. The company didn't "fail fast".
I guess I'm thinking where is the "fail fast" that is fast enough, but also not quitting too early?
Oh, that was another problem! The story says:
>> In practice it doesn’t work very well, but it’s good enough for an MVP.
No, that's quite clearly not good enough for an MVP! If your product's core functionality—baking stuff, in this case—only works one third of the time, then your product is not viable! It is maybe a proof of concept, but certainly not a product.†
So the company never should have released an MVP, they should have kept working on their reliability problems. Which is when the engineer should have realized "alright, this isn't going to work," and the whole company needs to pivot or close up shop.
Alternately, if they ship a real MVP that can produce perfect cakes with reasonable reliability, and the customers don't like it, that would also be time to change plans.
What happened in the story is they shipped a product that obviously doesn't work, customers dislike the fact that it doesn't work, and the obvious conclusion is "well, they didn't like it because it doesn't work yet," which is true but also obvious. You didn't learn anything.
This doesn't really answer your question and I don't think a definitive answer exists (and I've never worked in this space). But, obviously, this company should have stopped sooner than they did.
---
† The only exception I can see is if you can come up with a potential customer for which "an oven that bakes correctly one third of the time" would still meet their needs. Under the scenario in the story, I don't think this exists. For, say, an AI coding agent that can run automated tests and throw away bad results, a one third success rate may still be useful in some scenarios.
I think this speaks to the other major weakness of most founders: that they are optimists to a fault. The "MVP" in the story was a colossal failure. It wasn't "good enough." It was a disaster, and they should have just stopped there. But founders wouldn't be founders if they were able to know failure when they see it.
It resonates with my personal experience, and your writing style is fresh and dynamic.
Thanks for sharing it, and it deserves to be on the front page and #1.
Some folks want to gripe about everything. Life's too short to worry about them. They need to live in the world they make; not me.
Thanks for taking the time to write this up and share it ^_^
You can't please everyone
Different tastes
Which is a shame, because it makes those constructs less pleasant to read than they used to be. If you squint, and pretend AI doesn't exist (imagine!), then maybe you might be able to enjoy them again.
It is a little bit too long though.
If it didn't make more changes than you're aware of, then you should be aware that some features of your style are common amongst LLMs, and over-use of them will alienate some percentage of your audience (even if unfairly).
Key ones to look out for:
- Staccato prose: repeated runs of short sentences (e.g. "The founder nods. He gets it. He gets all of it.") - Negative pivots: anything with the structure of '!X; Y' (e.g. 'it’s not that nobody saw it: it’s that every week something jumped ahead of it')
These are valid linguistic features, but if you use them a lot, it sounds like AI writing, and people are wary of AI writing (because of the tidal wave of malicious, spamming & extractive actors using it). It will impact your audience.
I thought it might be intentional though? The first half reads very non-slop, and it just kind of inches its way in as the situation falls apart
These kinds of companies make hundreds of thousands or even millions a year. But it’s too small to hear about them.
Maybe we were saved by being acquired before hiring sales. Sai knew the problem & understood customers. He'd sometimes oversell a bit, but managed it: kept pulse of capacity for new development, would ask about how hard requested features were, would feel out customer intent & guide customer adapt to what was already there
When we had our pepepizza moment, there was an understanding that it wasn't going to work, took learnings of what would be involved there, but kept focus on improving what we already had
For kafka connector we had a design partner, I got to work with them directly. They wanted 30 microsecond message processing, so didn't want json. Original ask was flatbuffers. I decided to put message formatting into a scripting layer using gopher-lua. Spent a weekend getting flatbuffers working with lua (it was buggy, opened half a dozen PRs to flatbuffers repo which got ignored). It was clearly awful having to manage flatbuffer schema files & update scripts every time schema changed. But I had alternative already made: msgpack. Throughput needed work but addressed that by creating pool of lua interpreters
Overall I overworked myself (put my hands out of commission & spent months relearning how to type on split ergo colemak-dh), but I enjoyed the work. Team was very open with each other & when performance is your selling point there's an understanding that engineering quality needs to be maintained. Sure there were parts of the system I hated, & sometimes I'd try chip away at those
Hopefully that helps, hard to say the difference, but I really feel in my work that when customer has problem I'm part of conversation. Most recently there was talk of customer wanting cold data offloaded from postgres which is what inspired https://github.com/ClickHouse/pg_clickhouse/pull/298 where we get Postgres to do most the work
Raised problems trying to mix C++ into postgres extension, decided fix was to write clickhouse-c library to replace clickhouse-cpp, there was some doubt on team about value, but demonstrated value (https://github.com/ClickHouse/pg_clickhouse/pull/254) & I appreciate my colleagues not being afraid to change their mind
There's a level of trust where instead of being assigning tasks on a board I instead work on what I think is important based on information available. Nobody was asking for wal-rus, but I know my fleet
ClickHouse Cloud similarly took route of taking its time hiring sales. Better to have a small sales team that can work directly with engineering on quality leads than overwhelming everyone so that sales becomes the enemy. Guess the difference is agency. When engineering is involved in making commitments they're invested in delivering & there's push back so sales doesn't start hallucinating features
Quite the interesting part here is that if someone adheres to taste, the oven story would never happen. The question though is does taste matter more, or the oven :)
why does this happen though? i think it could be due to short-term thinking. like buying things with a credit card: you get the shiny new thing immediately, but the payment is diluted over time. likewise, once the sale is made, you may feel the reward immediately (though i guess it depends on the exact nature of the deal), but the work that will have to be done, will be done over time.
also, it's no wonder that the founder, or, outside start-ups, the marketing department, which specializes in promising impossible things, manages to evade the blame...
to the Amazon river everything and anything will be a bottleneck
In the article, the "smart" oven is only a speculation (maybe it works, and maybe someone will pay for it) and as such it is appropriate as a relatively low effort and low risk experiment on the part of an established oven maker (develop rudimentary automation and offer it as a very mildly disruptive feature at a modest price increase).
If only this simply applied to startups. Many enterprises today still remember their startup roots a little TOO clearly.
I've seen this Luigi in my standups (are people still doing these? whole other topic). Hell, I've been Luigi.
Is this unavoidable? - feels like it requires increasing amounts of deliberate concerted effort to avoid this kind of season.
When the glitter of "total freedom to build the perfect oven" patinas into the ground-hog's-day of endless tickets and breathless status updates, how do engineer-folk keep hopping back on the hamster wheel of birthday-cake features?
Asking for a friend .
The catch: domain experts don't know what they don't know about shipping. The fix — vibecoders build it, dev team hardens it for production.
Ever try make a product using Google Glass?
The leader never made the hard choice about who the product was for and what problem actually needed to be solved. A smaller product that works well for a market is usually better than one that is trying to solve for everything.
I went to the /blog route to see other posts by the author, but alas, there is only this one! And that's a gem.
Anecdotally I remember 1 hour to 90 minute lunches being the norm 10 years ago. Now, taking more than 30 minutes feels like I need to play 'catch up', primarily because the workload and expectations of SWEs has increased dramatically since then. The pay? Not commensurate. And that's even if you include the short lived post-Covid spike in salaries.
"Be grateful for what you have" gets old quick, especially when leaders (and I use that term loosely) use any opportunity to take more and more.
You don’t have to be beaten and starving to have a perspective and story to tell.
To whoever wrote this , thank you for so eloquently articulating something I’d failed to put into words.
Startups have nothing to do with innovation or making the world a better place.
It feels like it’s about creating the bubble, inflating it and cashing out before it bursts.
The problem is that those people are really bad at making money, and have a hard time competing with the people whose motivation is money.
It’s not evil, it’s just how money-oriented society works.
This is highly relatable. The part that it hides is the "lots of hours of your life" included part.
the teleport mechanism is built in into the base of the booth, so it does not affect overall design.
So what's the solution? Is there a playbook that avoids these pitfalls, or is it just the cost of the spin. Ideally, something early engineers can point to when we see non-technical founders falling into familiar traps.
- you need aligned incentives across the board. Sales and accounts mustn’t promise what the company can’t deliver
- people need to defend their area of expertise whilst listening to what others are saying about theirs. For me this boils down to a division between technical and business focussed. Techies need to push for non-client facing technical improvements without making everyone ignore them every time they say “technical debt”, and they need to accept that sometimes you just build shit to get business through the books. Sales/accounts need to accept that sometimes the build budget is taken up with mysterious technical drives that will be worth it. When I say “must accept” I mean accept that it must happen some percentage of the time - each case still needs to be backed up by a business case.
- ultimately this needs to come from the top - founder(s) must balance these facts and drive it through the whole organisation, and in the article they didn’t
For me there is no right answer. Maybe the engineer should have been more pushy with what things not to add. Maybe the founder entrepreneur should have been realistic. Maybe sales should have not had to promise things that were not developed yet. But to each of those there is a counter-argument of why that needed to be done in that moment.
Take it as a mental exercise.
When they didn't iterate on PMF with a niche client.
- not understanding sales and properly incentivizing them
- attacking only urgent problems (urgent vs important matrix)
- not taking constraints expressed by domain experts as real. (Big companies are actually good at this.)
for me the company should never have existed in the first place. and that lies with the founder. starts with them. falls on them.
i'm biased i suppose because my part in the "10%" part of my story was finding out just how little research anyone actually did... they all just wanted to play the role of important businessmen, big brain dev, co-founder etc. etc.
thank you for writing this. i'm still trying to come back from crashing and burning at that place. i might read this a few more times as it felt like my story too. the another Engineer part touched me. that's who i was in my story. it hurt.
edit -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48774444 hits the nail on the head with their last bullet point. bad leadership innit.
More often I see the opposite. 100 page pdfs that fall apart in first contact with reality.
I think it’s not about research, but it’s very hard to contribute in a field you haven’t actually had a career in.
"FOSS is universally unreliable" was one of such assumptions i had to push back against 5 years later. they meant academica produced software. but they assumed all foss is the same as all academica produced software.
Lots of people assume that the valuable thing is the direct business, but a business can be a lot more than that. A competitor may buy you for your engineers or sales team or patents, or assets, or whatever (e.g. Siri, Motorola, etc)... and just toss the rest of the business or sell that stuff off after they have what they want. In other industries they may just buy companies for their assets. Also you never know what will happen with a pivot (e.g. twitter, slack, etc).
The bleak reality is if you can keep growing (making more money than you spend) that alone is usually desirable enough for people to keep giving you money and eventually provide an exit. Why? because it's really hard to do. Its a skill.
And I have to say that no one tries to build a failed business. Founders can be really earnest about their intentions, work harder when they see the cracks, but often it just doesn't work, they don't find the right way before it's too late.
Maybe just before the end someone tries to siphon the funds into private account or assets into their next venture, but you tend to get caught doing so.
But everyone makes mistakes and bad deals in product development or they go out of business.
Oh cool it's still around!
Are you kidding me? Here's my business plan: manufacture faster computer chips than anyone else ever has before using new technology. Selling it is easy. Want faster computers? Buy our chips. End of pitch.
Here's my execution strategy: I'm going to hire the person who comments the most on Hackers News discussions about new chips and let him loose, then come back with a million new requirements because I never bothered to understand anything about how people want to use computer chips or how they're sold today.
My company eventually loses its only customer when it turns out that we don't know how to build faster computer chips at all.
The founder is not "very good", he's a moron who doesn't make a single good decision in the entire story. His failure is absolutely predictable because he doesn't add any value for anyone else at any point in the story, he doesn't understand his customers, he doesn't understand the market, and he doesn't understand his employees and their motivations. The only thing he ever does is raise money, and he's able to do that because his investors also know nothing about the customers, the market, or the potential employees.
Great business parable! This matches how reality works 100%, including the delusion that guys like this are "really smart".
Also my context is totally different. And MY oven concept has none of the drawbacks of their oven and Claude tells me I'm definitely on to something.
I'm off to the notary to sign the docs for Oven.ai (got the domain for only 300k!!) See ya on my yacht!
Premise is laughable right out of the gate.
> The founder offers him 20% of the company and total freedom to build the perfect oven
the slow dilution of the core vision and the engineer's freedom is the saddest thing in this
i'm gonna read it 2 more times at least.
If founder keep iterating and hyping his ovens with enough capital he could become big player in oven maker space and disrupting industry. Learning from this article was that he lacked capital and vision.
I've just been through this process. Very painful. SF based company, US founder.
Same founder story - couldn't focus on customers, couldn't focus on product, always a shiny new idea to distract him from had just been decided or what needed to be decided. Each idea could be the thing that made the difference. Willing to work hard, very capable of talking a good game, not able to deliver.
Tesla had a product that worked, was essentially first and best on the market, not that many models, not that many features. Focusing on the hype and gloss is ignoring a lot of substance. What even is the point of criticising a startup for its hype when its exactly what people want to hear and aligns to a lot of real, significant, ongoing research?
"If the founder had capital and vision" is pretty much tautological. It's true but not particularly useful to know that people who have money and know what to do with it will probably succeed.
Tesla was overhyped in the first decade after acquisition by Musk; it was bleeding money for 15 years. Arguably, the first Tesla cars were worse and pricier than traditional cars.
My point is that compared to the US, in Europe you have very few stories of successful stealth startups or startups that have needed lots of money for many years. That is a main reason why we cannot create a frontier LLM lab.
just pull harder on the vision bong, and grab some more of that sweet capital bro, or you're not gonna make it